I’m not much of an Excel guru, but there are times when even numerically challenged people like me need to use a spreadsheet to get work done. After you’ve got all those numbers entered and the formulas just right, you probably will want to print out your mathematical masterpiece. However, unlike Word, with Excel, what you see is very rarely what you get. I know that I’ve created many printouts with half a spreadsheet on one page and another half on another page. It’s really annoying.
The trick to getting Excel to print what you expect is to use the Print Preview feature. Before you print out your worksheet, choose File|Print Preview to see what it will really look like when you print it. The preview shows headers and footers, and includes a status bar at the bottom of the window with the current page number and the total number of pages. (The total number of pages is often where I find a surprise — what I thought was a small spreadsheet turns into four printed pages!)
In Print Preview, you see a number of buttons. Often changing the page orientation from portrait to landscape can make a spreadsheet print more nicely. Just click the Setup button and you’ll find radio buttons you can click to change the page orientation. While you are looking at the preview you also can adjust the column widths. Click the Margins button and click and drag the handles to adjust the columns or the margins around the page to help make everything fit.
Another nifty thing in the Print Preview is the Page Break Preview. If you click this button, you can change where a page break occurs. Many times in a long spreadsheet, automatic page breaks occur in odd places. However, you can adjust the page breaks on the worksheet, so groups of related numbers stay together.