Take the print out of your spread sheet the way you want.

 

Introduction

It is a common workplace issue that people face when they take the print out of their neatly created Excel sheet only to find out that one or more columns of their Excel sheet have exceeded the margin of the A4 sheet. It is frustrating and also leads to the wastage of paper.  Excel automatically divides your sheet into separate pages for printing based on margin settings, scaling option, paper size etc. without any regard to the number of columns or rows you may be having. As the number of columns of your sheet increases, it becomes more likely that your sheet will not print the way you want i.e. all columns in one page or all rows in one page.

People try many ways to work around this by changing the Font Size, manual resizing of Cell width, applying Landscape orientation to accommodate more columns in one page etc. But sometimes, even after these adjustments the sheet just doesn’t fit in one page. Also, it doesn’t increase your productivity if you are doing such manual adjustments on regular basis.

There are three ways to get what you may want:

1. Use the options available under Print Preview.
2. Set up the Print Area on your worksheet.
3. Manually set the page break though ‘Page Break Preview'.
   

Using options under Print Preview:

Print Preview gives you the idea of how it is going to look and it appears once your press Ctrl +  P and it looks like this:

 

Print Preview gives you the option to fit all Columns of your worksheet into one page. If you have too many columns then it will become unusable as the print out will be too small to read. However, if the columns of your excel sheet are exceeding by small number say 2-3, then you can fit all your columns into one page without the need to adjust the page breaks. To use this option, click on the ' No Scaling'  drop down and it will give you multiple option to fit all your sheet/columns/rows into one page as under:

As one can see, it scales the worksheet according to your selection and ignores any automatic or manual page breaks that you may have inserted. In lots of situation, the above will work with the condition that you don't have too many columns. 

But sometimes, you may want to take the print out of small portion of large table. To do that, first select the portion of your sheet you want to take the print out of and then Press Ctrl + P to open the Print Preview Settings. Under the Settings drop down there will be an option of 'Print Selection'. Select this option and you can preview what you just selected in the Work Sheet. 

Please do note that once you select 'Print Selection', the Excel will set this setting for any subsequent print outs. So, once you have taken the print out, don't forget to select the default option i.e. 'Print Active Sheets'.

Setting the Print Area

Sometimes you don't want to print the entire worksheet but only the specific selection(s) on the worksheet. Here, setting the Print Area comes handy. You also have the option of adding more selections to your print area which will print on a separate pages. To set the print area go to the Page Layout tab and in the Page Setup group, click Print Area, and then click Set Print Area. 

Once you have set up the print area, you can only preview your print area, rest of the worksheet will not be visible in Print Preview.

Using the Page Break Preview

You can view your worksheet in three views (Normal, Page Layout and Page Break Preview) and your worksheet, by default, appears in Normal View. The option to switch your views is the Right corner of your Excel Window. Just Click those tiny buttons to switch views.

 

You already know how worksheets looks in Normal view. In the Page Layout View, you view your worksheets in the form of pages and you get the feel of how your sheet will print out. 

The Page Break Preview allows you to adjust the page breaks on your worksheet. A sample snapshot of Page Break Preview is as under:

You can drag the dashed Blue Line to adjust the page breaks to suit your requirements and once you shift the page breaks it turns into solid Blue line and becomes your manual page break. You can adjust columns as well as your rows and after setting the page breaks to your liking you can revert to Normal View.

Conclusion:

The above steps should be able to help you out in taking the print out as you desire. In case, you are still having issues, kindly leave the comments below.