Excel Annoyances

Chapter 7. Printing Annoyances

Sooner or later, most worksheets get printed—providing tangible evidence of your hard work, as well as the real location of the paperless office (just down the block from Shangri-La). So it’s important that the printed output do your efforts justice. If you spend hours or even days entering data and building elaborate workbooks, you should be able to print out that data without hassles. In this chapter, I’ll look at the one class of annoyances that dogs all Excel users: controlling what prints. It might be multiple workbooks, a single worksheet, or even a small selection (as tiny as one cell). Then we’ll move on to annoyances you bang into when you request a special layout or try to control where content appears on a skein of printed pages. Along the way, you’ll discover how to control gridlines, page numbers, report titles, and so on. Finally, you’ll learn how to pick a printer, dictate output quality, check the status of a print job, and more.

BASIC PRINTING ANNOYANCES

SQUEEZE THAT ENTIRE WORKSHEET ONTO ONE PAGE

The Annoyance:

My worksheet prints with lots of its columns or rows scattered onto a second page. This makes it hard to read the worksheet (see a print preview in Figure 7-1), and it wastes paper—I really need it to fit onto a single sheet. How can I manage that?

Figure 7-1. Without intervention, critical information will be shunted ...