How to Print a (Clean) Excel Workbook
Introduction
If you need to print out your Excel sheet on paper, you might notice that some parts of your data can get cut off, especially if you have massive amounts of data! In this post, I'm going to show you how you can print out your data so that everything shows up on the paper cleanly.
Printer Margins
You probably know that to print anything you gotta do Ctrl+P. If you do this in Excel, it will give you a preview of how the paper will be printed.
For example, when I look at the preview for the sheet that I'm on, it looks like this:
Caption: Note: These numbers are not actually real
You can see that only part of a chart is showing up on the page. To fix this issue, here's what you can do:
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First, click on this button
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Then, click on the button that says "Custom Scaling Options"
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This will open up a new window. From there, click on the "Margins" tab
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There, you can change the inches of the margins
However, there's a better way that I like to do to make the pages come out clean.
(My Preferred Method) Using Page Layout
Personally, I like this method better because Excel zooms out so that you can see all of your data in a bird's eye view, which I think is kinda cool.
If you want to see this kind of view, go to the "View" ribbon and then click on "Page Layout":
Here's what it should look like:
You can drag each of the elements in your sheet so that nothing will be cut off. For example, I moved the bar chart to the second page so that it won't get off on the first page.
Now, if I look at the preview of how the page will turn out, nothing is cut off and it looks nice and clean:
You can see that this will print out 2 pages: one with the data and one with the chart.
Doing More with Page Layout
There's another cool feature with Page Layout.
You can add a header to your sheet by clicking in the top middle of the page in the Page Layout view. There, you can type in your header:
Adding a header to one of your pages will add the header to all of your pages.
You can also add page numbers of your Excel sheet. To do this, click on the bottom right corner in the Page Layout view. Then, click on the "Header & Footer" ribbon and click on "Page Number:
This adds a page number to all of your pages:
So, when you print the sheet out, you'll know the order of the pages because you inserted page numbers.
Conclusion
I hope you found this post helpful! My next post will be on data validation in Excel, so stay tuned for that! Thank you for reading and I hope you have a good day!