microsoft excel 2003:Printing

First, move to cell A1.

All of the Windows spreadsheets try to figure out what you want to print. Sometimes they're right,
sometimes they're wrong. So........

The most important thing with printing is to tell the printer what to print.

Unlike a word processor, you may need to highlight what you want to print. For the moment, we’ll assume that Excel 2003 will “guess” correctly, and that you have not “clicked” somewhere that will cause a problem. If you do have problem, which we’ll know in a second, we’ll show you how to take care of the problem a bit later.

It's usually a good idea to see what our printout will look like – before you print it. First, we’ll use a Print Preview to “see” what our spreadsheet looks like. To do this we’ll click-on the Print Preview Button in the Button Bar. Point to the Print Preview button and click on it.

A picture, of what our printout will look like, appears on the next page.


At the top of the Print Preview screen you will see the button bar above. We’ll use a number of the buttons on this bar to assist us with our printing.

Notice that the Next and Previous buttons at the left end of the bar are not highlighted with text – they are just gray. This means that the buttons are not “active.” This indicates that we are OK with our spreadsheet – it is all on one page. If we saw that the Next button was active, this would mean that there are other pages to our spreadsheet. If you’ll look at the lower left corner of the Print Preview screen you’ll see: Preview: Page 1 of 1. This confirms that our spreadsheet is on one page. If you do not see this “combination,” we’ll show you how to take care of it later.

If you do see this combination, click-on the Print button. Click-on OK in the Print menu screen that appears. Label this printout as: Default Spreadsheet Printout.


Next, notice that an “image” of your spreadsheet appears below the button bar (above).


If you move your cursor over the spreadsheet, you’ll notice that the cursor changes from an arrow to a tiny magnifying glass. If you click the left mouse button, your magnifying glass will “zoom-in” on the exact spot where the magnifying glass is located. If you click-again, it will zoom-out. Try this a couple of time. It is a really handy feature.


Now click-on Setup in the top button bar.




The Page Setup menu screen at the top of the next page will appear.


Notice that the Page Setup menu screen indicates that you are in Portrait view. Now we’ll enhance the spreadsheet to make it a bit more presentable. In the Orientation area click-in the small circle in front of Landscape (see arrow above). The spreadsheet will now print on the page as indicated. Next, in the Scaling area, click-in the box to the left of % normal size. Using either the “up/down” arrows, or by typing in the information, change the size to 125. Then click-on OK.

Your spreadsheet will now be larger and fill the paper more appropriately. Click-on Print and when this spreadsheet comes out of the printer label it: landscape – enlarged to 125 %.

Go ahead and adjust the “size” of your spreadsheet so that it becomes too large to fit on a single page. Set the Scaling to 200 and click-on OK. When you return to the Preview screen, the Next and Previous buttons at the top will now be active, and you’ll see 1 of 3 or 4 pages in the lower left corner of the screen. Go ahead and click-on the Next and Previous buttons to get a “feel” of the “size” of your spreadsheet. If you click-on Print (please don’t do it), you’ll get these 3 or 4 pages. If you made a mistake when you created the spreadsheet, you might see that you have 58 pages in your spreadsheet!

Now, click-in the small circle to the left of Fit 1 page(s) wide by 1 tall in the Scaling area and make sure that 1 page is set. Excel 2003 will now return your spreadsheet to one page. Try other things here. Work with the Margins, Header/ Footer, and Sheet tabs at the top of the Page Setup menu screen. Any time you desire to print, go ahead and do so. This will give you a feel for how the spreadsheets will print. When you are finished, simply click-on Close and you will return to your spreadsheet.
Many folks ask how to center a spreadsheet on the page. This feature is located in Margins at the bottom of the Margins screen. Simply click-on Margins at the top of the Preview screen or on the Margins tab when you are in the Page Setup screen.

Many folks also ask about how to place gridlines and show the row and column headings (A, B, C and 1, 2, 3) in their spreadsheet printouts. This feature is located on the Sheet tab in the Setup screen menu.