AlfaProfitGen Blog

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.

Find important info for website traffic – your individual knowledge base.

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.

Grab useful suggestions in the topic of web traffic – your individual guide.