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Microsoft Excel’s page formatting features are accessed by clicking on the page layout tab of the Excel ribbon. When working with page formatting, you may also find it useful to enter page layout mode by clicking on the page layout button in the status bar. Adjust the zoom as required and you now have a constantly updated preview of how your document will look when it prints out.

Excel also displays the number of pages required to print a document on the status bar. Some worksheets would probably benefit from changing the orientation to landscape. This often enables you to fit all the columns onto a single page. To change the orientation, choose Orientation and then Landscape.

Excel offers three ways of changing the margins. The first is to click on the Margins button and choose one of the presets. Here, you’ll find four options: the last settings used, normal, wide and narrow. One of these settings may well be ideal for your data. If not, the second method of modifying margins is to enter custom settings. This is done by choosing Custom Margins in the Margins drop down menu.

When entering margin settings in this window, it is important to realise that there’s a difference between left and right margins and also top and bottom margins. The figure you enter in the left and top boxes will be faithfully reproduced by Excel. So, for example, if we set the left margin to 3 cm, you will have precisely 3 cm on the left-hand margin. However, because Excel never prints a fragment of a row or a fragment of a column and only prints complete rows and columns, the figure you enter on the right will be the minimum margin rather than a figure which Excel can faithfully reproduce each time. And the same applies to the bottom margin setting.

The third method of modifying margins is perhaps the best of all. It’s also the most interactive. Simply position the cursor on the left of the ruler and drag to the left or right to change the margins. Excel immediately updates the preview of your page and shows you the actual margin setting. You can continue dragging until you are happy with the margins.

Another simple way of changing the way in which your data will print is to change the paper size. In many cases, you can reduce the number of pages required by using A3 paper instead of A4. Naturally, it’s only possible to change the paper size in this way if you have a printer capable of handling that paper size. If you output most of your documents to PDF, paper size will not be a problem and changing the paper size in this way is often a good solution.

The author is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Training, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007 Classes in London and throughout the UK.

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There are basically three types of controls found on the Microsoft Word ribbon: buttons, drop-down menus and launchers. The Bold control, found on the Home tab, is an example of a simple button. When you click the Bold button, highlighted text becomes bold. If you click the same button again, the highlighted text reverts to normal.

The Change Case control is an example of a drop-down menu. Clicking the control shows you a series of options. For example, if you choose Other Case, the highlighted text becomes capitalised if it lowercase and vice versa. If I choose Capitalise Each Word, only the first letter in each word is capitalised.

Some controls are a combination of both simple buttons and drop-down menus. One example of this type is Underline, which consists of two sections: a button on the left and a drop-down menu on the right. If you click on the button, the default underline is applied; usually the underline style which was last used. If you click on the drop-down menu, you are given a series of options for customising the underline. You have a choice of styles: solid, dotted, double, and so forth. You can also change the underline colour. As with the Bold button, if you click the Underline button a second time, the underline is removed. Also, any line style that you chose from the drop-down menu will become the default.

Launcher buttons are displayed in the bottom right of certain ribbon tab groups. They replace those menu commands in previous versions of Word which launched dialogue boxes or other options. Clicking on the launcher button displays a series of options either in a task pane or a dialog box. For example, in the Home tab, the Clipboard launcher button displays its options in a task pane. In the case of the Font group launcher button, the options are displayed in a dialog box.

The Microsoft Word 2007 ribbon takes up quite a lot of screen space; approximately 20% of the average screen. If this becomes inconvenient, you can minimise the ribbon at any time by simply double-clicking on the name of any tab. When the ribbon is minimised, it can still be used. Simply click on the name of a tab and the options will appear once more. Once you have chosen an option the ribbon will be minimised again. To revert the ribbon to its normal behaviour, simply-double click on any tab. A second way of minimising the ribbon is to go to the Quick Access Toolbar and choose Minimise the Ribbon. To revert the ribbon to its normal size, choose the same option once more.

The author of this article is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Training, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Word 2007 Classes in London and throughout the UK.

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Using Quick Print and Print Preview in Excel

Excel’s Quick Print facility allows you to send a document to the default printer without the need of entering values in a dialog box. If the Quick Print button is not already displayed on your Quick Access Toolbar, simply choose it from the Customize Quick Access Toolbar drop-down menu. You will notice that the tooltip which appears when you position the mouse over the Quick Print button has the name of the default printer in brackets. If the printer that is displayed is not the one you anticipated you can simply use the regular Print command instead.

If like a growing number of Word users, most of your documents are sent electronically, you may have Adobe PDF set as the default printer. If this is the case, when you click the Quick Print button, you will be prompted to save the file since printing to Adobe PDF means producing a disc file.

Whatever your default printer, Excel will print the documents using its default settings: moderate margins, no header or footer, no column or row headings and no gridlines. If the document cannot be printed on a single page, Excel will produce multiple pages moving down first and then across. Having printed the document Excel paginates your worksheet and subsequently displays the page boundaries as dotted lines.

Whereas Quick Print sends the document to the printer straight away, Print Preview offers a method of previewing the document prior to sending it to the printer and is often a useful precaution. To access Print Preview, click on the Office button in the top left of your screen, choose Print and then Print Preview.

If the preview of the document looks fine, simply click on the print button to send the document of the printer. If the document needs to be modified in order to be printed correctly, one option is to click on Page Setup. This gives you access to settings such as the orientation, margins, header and footer, as well as other advanced features.

You also have the option of zooming in on your data by clicking on the zoom button. When you click the zoom button a second time, the whole page is displayed once more. Excel allows you to preview all the pages by clicking on the Next and Previous buttons.

You can also show or hide margins. Margins consist of dotted lines with drag handles at the end of each line. The margins displayed in Print Preview are fairly comprehensive. Firstly, we have the page margins: top, bottom, left and right. Next, we have margins to control the area available to headers and footers. Finally, we have drag handles allowing us to change the column widths. You will often find that you can reduce the number of pages required to print a document simply by changing the various margins.

Author is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Training, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel Training Courses in London and throughout the UK.

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Many of the worksheets that are created in Microsoft Excel contain headings in the top row or left column of the sheet. Normally when we scroll down the sheet, any headings at the top will disappear. Similarly, if we scroll to the right, any headings on the left will disappear. Excel has two commands which can be used to keep these headings in place as we scroll through the worksheet: freeze panes and split panes. We will discuss techniques for splitting panes in another article. This article focuses on the use of the Freeze Panes commane.

The Freeze Panes command, which is located in the View Tab of the Excel Ribbon, allows us to freeze our headings so that, as we scroll the sheet, headings remain in view.

Excel offers us three options: firstly, we can choose “Freeze Top Row”. A bold horizontal line is then displayed underneath the first row which extends into the row headings. As we scroll down the worksheet, the headings at the top of the sheet remain in view. Similarly, we can choose “Freeze First Column”. This time, the bold line extends to the right of the first column and into the column heading area. Then, as we scroll to the right, the first column remains frozen so that we can see the headings it contains and compare them with the data in the adjacent cells. To return to normal scrolling, we simply choose “Unfreeze Panes” in the “Freeze Panes” drop-down menu.

It is also possible to freeze an arbitrary number of rows and columns. To do this, select the cell below the last row you want frozen and to the right of the last column you want frozen. So, for example, to freeze the first row and the first column you would select cell “B2″. Having highlighted the cell, in the “Freeze Panes” drop-down menu, you would then choose “Freeze Panes”.

This time, there are two bold lines: one indicating the column that is frozen and one indicating the row that is frozen. Then, as we scroll down the first row remains frozen and, similarly, when we scroll to the right the first column remains frozen. Once again, to return to normal behavior, we simply choose “Unfreeze Panes” in the “Freeze Panes” drop-down menu.

Since this command allows us to freeze any number of rows or columns, if you are working on a large worksheet perhaps containing multiple row and column headings, you will probably find it pretty much an essential feature.

The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Training, a UK IT training company offering Excel 2007 Classes in Birmingham, London, Leeds, Manchester, Bristol, Cambridge, Bradford, Liverpool and throughout the UK.

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Excel 2007 allows you to change the order of worksheets within a workbook at any time. There are two ways of achieving this, the first of which is simply to drag the tabs representing each worksheet left or right. As well dragging individual tabs, it is also possible to highlight several tabs and drag them all at the same time.

Not only can we move worksheets around within the same workbook, it is also possible to move worksheets from one workbook to another. For example, suppose you have a workbook containing a worksheet for each month of the year (”Jan”, “Feb”, etc.) and that we now want to split this into four smaller workbooks, one for each quarter: the first containing “Jan”, “Feb” and “Mar”; the second containing “Apr”, “May” and “Jun”; and so forth.

To minimise the number of sheets we will end up with in each workbook, we could begin by changing the default number of worksheets Excel will give us in each new workbook. To do this, we click on the Office Button and choose Excel Options. In this section that reads “When creating new workbooks Include This Many Sheets”, we change the number to one. We can then create four sheets by clicking four times on the new sheet icon on the Quick Access Toolbar.

Each of our new workbooks has one sheet, which is the minimum that Excel will allow. We can access these new workbooks by clicking on the View Tab and accessing Switch Windows drop-down menu. The first method of moving worksheets from one workbook to another is to drag and drop. To do this, we will need to see all the workbooks simultaneously. Excel has a special command for doing this. In the View Tab, click on the Arrange All button and choose “Tiled”. Excel will then present each of the workbooks in a miniature window, allowing us to see all of the open workbooks simultaneously.

The next step would be to highlight the three sheets relating to the first quarter: we click on “Jan”, hold down the Shift key and click on “Mar”. We can then drag the selected sheets into the window of one of the new workbooks. We can repeat this procedure for the other quarters.

As we saw earlier, the minimum number of sheets which you can have in a workbook is one. Therefore, when we have moved the last three sheets from the original workbook, the window will simply disappear. Naturally, however, the last saved version of the file will still exist.

The final step would be to delete the unwanted sheet from each of the four new workbooks. Having done this, to leave the split screen view and return to normal mode, we simply maximise any of the windows.

As a matter of interest, the second way of copying sheets from one workbook to another is to use the Move or Copy Sheets command. This is available in the Format drop-down menu in the Cells section of the Home Tab or by right-clicking on the selected sheet tabs. As the name implies, as well is moving sheets, this method allows you to create a copy at another location.

The author is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Training, a UK IT training company offering Excel Classes at their central London training centre.

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