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Page Setup Options

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About this lesson

Learn about page setup options, fitting print jobs on a page, headers and footers, and other ways to customize print jobs.

Lesson versions

Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:

2013, 2016, 2019/365.

Exercise files

Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ Excel workbooks from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.

Page Setup Options.xlsx
46.1 KB
Page Setup Options - Completed.xlsx
46.2 KB

Quick reference

Page Setup Options

Setting page setup options, fit print jobs on a page, creating headers and footers, and otherwise customizing a print job to look as attractive as possible.

When to use

There is nothing more frustrating than spending a bunch of time setting up your worksheet to look great, and then find out it won’t print correctly. These techniques will help you deal with this issue.

Instructions

Forcing a print job to fit on one page

  • Check print preview first (notice that this job fits on 6 pages!)
  • Go to the Page Layout tab and choose “1 Page” from the Width dropdown
  • The job will now print to two pages only, as it has been scaled (1 page wide by x pages tall)

Setting headers and footers

  • Go to Page Layout > Print Titles
  • On Rows to Repeat at Top click the ref-edit box and select rows 1:3
  • Select the Header/Footer tab
  • Click Custom Header and click in the right box
  • Type “Printed “, click the calendar icon, type a space, click the clock icon, click OK
  • Click Customer Footer and click in the right box
  • Type “Page “, click the # icon, type “ of “, click the multi-page icon, click OK
  • Click Print Preview
  • Notice that we have nice headers, footers and repeated rows at the top of each page

Adding row and column headers and gridlines

  • Go to Page Layout > Print Titles
  • Check the box nest to Gridlines
  • Check the box next to Row and column headings
  • Click Print Preview
  • Notice that we now have a print job that looks like a spreadsheet (very useful if you’ve selected to print comments at the end of the sheet, as it gives context to reference.)
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  • 00:04 Let's look at printing options in Excel,
  • 00:06 we're gonna start off with this worksheet here.
  • 00:09 And before we go anywhere, I'm gonna go to the File tab, and
  • 00:13 I'm gonna choose to print, and this will show me the Print Preview.
  • 00:17 Now the challenge that I've got here is that I have 16 pages that this is
  • 00:22 printing to, but why?
  • 00:24 And if I go on index up on this a little bit it will keep showing me
  • 00:27 the print preview.
  • 00:28 And I'm gonna move up to page nine and you can see what the problem is, so
  • 00:32 you got this extra column showing up here.
  • 00:35 In addition, we've lost the headers, we don't have any indications of how many
  • 00:39 pages we have, but it's definitely some challenge here that we wanna deal with.
  • 00:42 So the first thing that we're going to do is we're gonna
  • 00:45 go to the Page Layout tab and we're gonna take a little bit of control over this.
  • 00:49 Notice that once I've done a print preview, I see a dotted line for
  • 00:52 where the page break actually is, and
  • 00:53 that's a helpful indicator to see if we can actually fix things.
  • 00:57 The first thing that I would like to do is set this to print to
  • 01:00 one page wide by as many pages tall as we need.
  • 01:03 And we can do that right here on the Scale to Fit area by saying print to a width of
  • 01:07 one page.
  • 01:09 Now when I go back to my Print preview,
  • 01:12 you'll notice that I'm down to five pages because I've got the huge title
  • 01:16 across the top of this that's actually making this really, really narrow.
  • 01:20 Maybe I don't wanna see that, I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna hide these two rows
  • 01:25 because they're just here for demonstration purposes anyway.
  • 01:29 So let's do a Print Preview now, and see that we're actually at eight pages, so
  • 01:33 that looks a little bit better.
  • 01:35 Now some other things that I might wanna do, when I hit to the next page,
  • 01:40 I lose all of my headers.
  • 01:41 I also have no indication of what's actually being done for
  • 01:45 how many pages have been printed.
  • 01:47 So let's see if we can control this by changing some headers and footers.
  • 01:50 And the easiest way to do that is to go and click on the Print Titles button.
  • 01:56 Now the first thing, we have the ability to Print repeat rows at top.
  • 02:00 I'm gonna go and grab this, and say, let's grab rows 1 through 5, and
  • 02:05 now on the top of every worksheet, the title and the column headers will show up.
  • 02:11 I could also, if I wanted to, turn on grid lines and even the row and
  • 02:14 column headings so that I can actually see the ABC and the row numbers as well.
  • 02:20 I'm gonna add to a header while I'm in here as well, and
  • 02:22 I think I'm gonna create my very own.
  • 02:25 This one is gonna say something like, how about, printed, space.
  • 02:30 And then I'm gonna click the calendar, space, and the little time.
  • 02:36 And this puts in the field codes that are required to put in the date and
  • 02:38 time properly.
  • 02:40 And when I say OK, you'll notice it actually tells me, November 17,
  • 02:44 2018, that's the day I'm recording this, as well as the actual time itself.
  • 02:48 I'm now going to go to custom footer while I'm here and
  • 02:51 I think it's a really good idea on the bottom right-hand corner to say,
  • 02:53 page and we'll choose this guy here with the number.
  • 02:57 Space of space, and then this one here with the multi pages, so
  • 03:01 this gives me page number of pages.
  • 03:04 And when I say OK, you'll notice it says Page 1 of 1, now it always says Page 1
  • 03:09 of 1 here, it's no big deal, at this point, we're gonna say OK.
  • 03:12 Nothing looks different and yet, when I go into my Print Preview, you're gonna notice
  • 03:17 that some things have changed I've got my row and column headings.
  • 03:21 Now I don't turn this on often and for a table it doesn't make a lot of sense, but
  • 03:25 sometimes you do need to see this, so you now know where to toggle that.
  • 03:29 If I go and actually click through to the next page,
  • 03:31 you can see that my time stamp is still showing in the top,
  • 03:34 I still have my report headers here, and I can see page two of eight.
  • 03:39 In addition, right inside the Print Preview window,
  • 03:41 I have the ability to actually do things like.
  • 03:43 Fit all columns on one page or all rows on one page as well,
  • 03:46 that wouldn't work very well for this document.
  • 03:49 I can change my margins, maybe I want it to be a little big, so I can make narrow
  • 03:53 margins that will actually square it up to give me a little more room.
  • 03:56 Now that kicks me to nine pages, but that's okay.
  • 03:59 I can change the paper size and the paper orientation as well, and all kinds of
  • 04:03 other things in here, and that's really the basics of printing in Excel.

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