Special Edition Using Microsoft® Office XP

Printing Worksheets

Unlike Word documents, which typically are designed to fit on specific paper sizes, Excel worksheets are free-flowing environments that sprawl in every direction. If you click the Print button and leave the formatting to Excel, you'll end up with page breaks that appear at arbitrary locations in your worksheet, with no regard to content. To properly translate a large worksheet into printed output takes planning and a fair amount of creative formatting.

If you don't specifically define a print area, Excel assumes that you want to print all the data in the currently selected worksheet or worksheets, beginning with cell A1 and extending to the edge of the area that contains data or formatting. If necessary, you can divide a worksheet ...