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Printing Excel Spreadsheets

If you have ever printed an Excel spreadsheet, you probably are aware of how tricky it can be to get your document to come out exactly how you want. Lucky for you, we have some tips to help you print out your next Excel spreadsheet to the exact specifications you desire. It's actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it.

 

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How to print Excel spreadsheets step-by-step instructions:

1. Set the print area

  • Highlight the area you want to print. The best way I've seen to do this is to zoom out and then highlight from A1 to whichever cell you would like to print
  • Go to "Page Layout" tab under the "Page Setup" ribbon section and click "Print Area" then "Set Print Area"

2. Set the print titles

  • In the same "Page Setup" ribbon section click "Print Titles"
  • This will bring up a popout window.
  • In the rows to repeat at top and/or columns to repeat at left enter the cells you want to repeat (ie. $1:$2)
  • In the same "Page Setup"window/sheet, click "Print Preview"

3. Set the number of pages

  • Within the print preview window click "Page Setup"
  • In the "Page Setup" window set "Fit to" the number of pages wide you want the document to be by the number of pages tall.

Congratulations! You are already 80% there, but if you would like to fine-tune margins, or add a title, and page numbers before printing, proceed to steps 4 & 5.

4. Fine tune

As much as I would like to explain how to fine tune your print job, it is very difficult to explain without showing. The video explains it MUCH better than I can in writing. Find this at the two-minute mark.

5. Add header and page numbers

  • To change the header, click the "View" tab under the "Workbook Views" ribbon section and click "Page Layout"
  • This will allow you to add a header to the top by clicking on the "Click to add header" prompt text
  • To add page numbers to the footer, click the "Design" tab under the "Navigation" ribbon section and click "Go to Footer"
  • Then under the "Header & Footer Elements" ribbon section click "Page Number"
  • To return to the "Normal" view, click the "View" tab and in the "Workbook Views" ribbon section click "Normal"

6. Print

  • [CTRL + P] is a great shortcut to get you to the print menu
  • It's always best to click through the preview before printing
  • You are all set!

How to print Excel spreadsheets video transcript:

Have you ever needed to print a large excel data sheet and had trouble with the formatting?

In this Quick Tip, we will learn how to add headers and footers, find appropriate scaling, and how to use the Print Titles function so your row and column headings appear on every page instead of making sure you don’t get any pages that look like this.

Whenever printing a worksheet it’s always best to set your print area first.

If I were to zoom out with the zoom slider, we’d see an area that I don’t want to be printed. I only want to print this data here. So let’s zoom back to 40% and highlight all the data that we want Excel to print.

Then go to Page Layout tab under the Page Setup section and click Print Area … Set Print Area. So now just this area of our spreadsheet will be printed.

And let’s zoom back in. To lock our headings for printing, in the same Page Setup section click on Print Titles.

We are looking at these two boxes here. Rows to repeat at top and columns to repeat at left.

You can type in the lock code here or use these buttons. Or you can simply put your cursor in the Rows box then drag-click the first two rows two represent the entire row heading. And then select the Columns box and click anywhere on the column heading.

Let’s see what this data looks like. We can use one of these two buttons to get to the Print page or we can go to the tab and select Print.

We can go down here to click through the various pages and see that our column and row headings stay fixed, allowing us to see what this data is representing.

And just eyeing this here, I’d like to change the Orientation from Portrait to Landscape. And let’s see if I can get this whole excel worksheet onto 4 pages.

Click on this Page Setup shortcut.; Change this to Fit 2 pages wide by 2 pages tall. Click Okay.

And there we have it. Our document is ready for printing with all the row and column headings locked.

Now you know how to lock row and column headings when you are viewing data on a computer monitor in Excel or viewing data on pages of a large worksheet.