Prepare to Print

Quick reference

• 00:04 Once you've done compiling your report and you're ready to print,
• 00:08 printing in Excel is easy enough, click on file, and click on Print.
• 00:13 But before you click on the Print button,
• 00:15 it's important you look at what you're about to print.
• 00:18 There's my report on the right and
• 00:20 as I advanced through the various pages doesn't look very good to me.
• 00:24 The first time you look at the print option,
• 00:26 you'll see that Excel adds these dotted grey lines in the document.
• 00:29 Those indicate the page breaks.
• 00:32 Now to fix how your report will print,
• 00:34 most of the options are sitting on the page layout tab.
• 00:37 First thing you should do, is set the size of your paper.
• 00:41 You could set it later but if you start setting page breaks and
• 00:44 formatting things and then, change the size of the paper later,
• 00:47 you'll probably have to change things all over again to fit correctly.
• 00:51 So the best option here, is start by setting your paper size.
• 00:56 And usually in accounting reports can be very wide because it often includes
• 01:00 monthly reports and you've got 12 months in a year.
• 01:03 So under orientation, you can change the printout to landscape if you like.
• 01:07 I'm going to when we do that,
• 01:09 you'll see that the page break is now moved between columns K and L..
• 01:14 Better, but I would like to move it between columns O and P.
• 01:19 So we can go up and change my page width to automatically fit one page.
• 01:25 If my graphs down below or slightly touching that border,
• 01:29 it might decide to include column P in my printout as well, but we'll see.
• 01:34 The second way you can check print options other than file and
• 01:38 print is on this page setup arrow.
• 01:41 Click on that page setup arrow in the lower corner.
• 01:45 And then you can click on print preview.
• 01:48 And now we can see it looks a little better, but
• 01:51 there's still kind of a wide area on the right.
• 01:54 We can fix that when we do our page breaks.
• 01:57 Right now that's the situation with our pages.
• 02:01 So let's go back and work on our page breaks.
• 02:04 Go to view, and page break preview.
• 02:09 And it's best to check everything in here.
• 02:11 First thing I can see is that Excel did choose to include column P, as well.
• 02:16 So let's change that.
• 02:17 Just hover the mouse over that blue line on the right click and drag.
• 02:22 And now that sets the print area for us.
• 02:26 The print area is in this white.
• 02:28 And then the part that Excel is not going to print is over in this grey on
• 02:33 the right.
• 02:34 And you can see that Excel has automatically marked page breaks with
• 02:38 the dotted blue lines.
• 02:40 We can change those two just click and drag any of the ones that you see.
• 02:47 I want my graphs on a separate page.
• 02:49 The page break is kind of hidden between those two graphs.
• 02:51 So let's just click and drag that up.
• 02:56 So things are looking a lot better here.
• 02:58 We can switch back to the normal view if we're done with our page breaks.
• 03:03 And one thing I noticed was that there's no headings on all the pages it seems
• 03:08 a little bare, but we can fix that to go to the page layout tab, and
• 03:12 print titles, brings up the same page setup dialog box that this arrow does in
• 03:17 the lower right of that section.
• 03:20 This has a nice rows to repeat at top and columns to repeat at left option means if
• 03:25 I pick two rows like outdoor warehouse sales and annual sales report,
• 03:29 it's going to display those two rows at the top of each page.
• 03:34 That's perfect.
• 03:36 You can do the same thing with columns if you like.
• 03:38 But when we hit print preview, now you can see outdoor warehouse sales annual sales
• 03:43 report at the top of each page.
• 03:45 It gives it a much nicer look.
• 03:48 So let's add a footer to let's click the page setup arrow.
• 03:52 Look at header slash footer, we can add some custom information to display in
• 03:57 either the header or the footer or both.
• 04:00 On the left hand side of the footer, I want to include a date and a time that
• 04:03 there are a little buttons that you can click to add those dynamically.
• 04:07 Click on date, and then type in a space and then click on time and
• 04:11 those are dynamic.
• 04:13 So each time you print the date and time will update.
• 04:17 On the right hand side I want to show something like page one of three.
• 04:20 And that's easy enough for Excel to do dynamically as well.
• 04:24 You type in page and then a space.
• 04:28 Then click on the single page button, and that will display the current page number.
• 04:31 And type in space of and then click on this little stack of pages
• 04:36 button that displays the total number of pages in the print.
• 04:41 So Excel will count all the pages that are there and it will display page one of
• 04:46 three or page five of 10 or whatever it will end up being on that page.
• 04:50 So hit OK and now you can see this little preview here what the footer will
• 04:54 look like and that's really nice.
• 04:58 Okay, one more thing I'd like to share, we can add the print,
• 05:02 preview and print, button to our quick access toolbar at the top and
• 05:06 that'll make the print process nice and convenient.
• 05:10 Click on that little drop down arrow, and you can choose print preview and
• 05:14 print from the list.
• 05:16 We already have it, but let's leave it there.
• 05:18 Anytime you click on that button, it takes you right to the print preview option.
• 05:24 Now the report looks great.
• 05:26 I can choose to print.
• 05:27 Of course I don't have to physically print this.
• 05:30 I can make it into a PDF if I want.
• 05:32 So we choose Microsoft print to PDF.
• 05:36 It'll create a PDF for us.
• 05:38 And then we can share that file or attach it to an email and send it to a client.
• 05:43 And that will look beautiful.

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