Excel 2003 for Starters: The Missing Manual

Printing

Printing in Excel is pretty straightforward—as long as your spreadsheet fits on a normal 8.5 x 11-inch piece of paper. If you're one of the millions of spreadsheet owners who don't belong to that club, then welcome to the world of Multiple Page Disorder: the phenomenon in which pages and pages of apparently unrelated and noncontiguous columns start spewing from your printer. Fortunately, Excel comes with a slew of print-tweaking tools designed to help you control what you're printing. First off, though, it helps to understand the settings Excel uses when you click the print button:

Note

You can change most of the settings listed; the following is just a list of what happens if you don't adjust any settings before printing a spreadsheet.

• In the printout, Excel uses all the formatting characteristics you've applied to the cells, including fonts, fills, and borders. However, Excel's gridlines, row headers, and column headers don't appear in the printout.

• If your data is too long (all the rows won't fit on one page) or too wide (all the columns won't fit), Excel prints the data on multiple pages. If your data is both too long and too wide, Excel prints in the following order: all the rows for the first set of columns that fit on a printed page, then all the rows for the next set of columns that fit, and so on (this is known as "down, then over"). When printing on multiple pages, Excel never prints part of an individual column or row.

• Excel prints your file in color if you use colors ...