Printing and Viewing Tips

Quick reference

• 00:04 This always seems to be an afterthought in model preparation, but it shouldn't be,
• 00:09 it should be something you've got your eye on the ball with the whole time,
• 00:13 that's printing and viewing.
• 00:15 How often have you received a model from somebody else,
• 00:19 decided to print it out on a printer and then, run as fast as you can over there,
• 00:23 when you realize you have to take out a Brazilian rain forest,
• 00:27 the amount of pages It's got to print out onto.
• 00:30 You really should think about this, even if you don't have access to the printer
• 00:34 the end user may likely print the model out on.
• 00:37 Workbook printing consists of getting the margins right,
• 00:41 sheet consistency, page margin consistency, putting page numbers on,
• 00:45 explaining the actual file, and making it all look neat and tidy.
• 00:51 And guess what, EXEL's not very good at getting this result,
• 00:54 this is something you still have to do.
• 00:55 A second example, I'm going to use a model very similar to the one
• 01:01 I used to show the overall check structure in the model a few sessions back.
• 01:06 It's very, very similar, we've got a navigation sheet again,
• 01:10 we've got both the style guide, we got model parameters, etc.
• 01:13 But I've got this sales assumption sheet which goes on forever.
• 01:18 Yes its got some calculations at the end, but as long as the input are separated
• 01:21 from the calculations, it's still following graph being consistency,
• 01:26 robustness, flexibility to transparency, you can still find the inputs and
• 01:31 you know where the calculations are.
• 01:34 Great, more sheets here.
• 01:37 People forget about actually setting it up for printing.
• 01:41 And one of the problems can actually be that you don't have access to the end
• 01:44 user's printer, so it can be difficult to set up the margins wonderfully.
• 01:48 So yes, it's all very well being able to set up these and
• 01:51 go for custom margins, but if you haven't got access to the printer because you're
• 01:55 on a different network or in a different country.
• 01:57 That can be a little bit awkward.
• 02:00 There are useful things on here.
• 02:01 You can change the orientation between portrait and landscape,
• 02:05 here on the page layout section of the ribbon in page setup.
• 02:09 But one of the things I can actually do in here is set the print area, if I want.
• 02:14 I can just decide I only want to print this bit, not the whole worksheet and
• 02:18 press Set Print Area, and that's the only bit that will print.
• 02:22 Things that you should consider setting up universally,
• 02:25 and the way to do that is to highlight all the sheets leads.
• 02:28 Now, they've got rid, in later versions of Excel, of the go to end sheet here.
• 02:32 So, what you do is you hold the Ctrl button down, and you go right-click.
• 02:37 We'll see all the sheets here, so it takes me to the end.
• 02:40 If I hold the Shift button down, I've now selected all the sheets in here,
• 02:45 because you can still go in and set up headers and footers.
• 02:49 Headers and footers, where is that?
• 02:51 I can't see it here.
• 02:52 Well, it's actually if you click on this button here that no one notices,
• 02:56 it's like the options.
• 02:58 Click there.
• 02:59 Here we go.
• 03:00 We're in the page setup dialog box, header and
• 03:03 footer and I've got these options I can do.
• 03:05 But it's great to set all this up consistently in one go and
• 03:10 this is the easiest way to do it.
• 03:12 Custom header, you've got three sections, the left, the middle, and the right.
• 03:16 You can put things in like your own text, page one of 20, you can insert a date,
• 03:23 a time, where the file path is, file name, etc., etc.
• 03:27 You can put all that in, brilliant.
• 03:28 I'm just going to put this in the footer.
• 03:33 For the footer I've gained notice, I can have a different first page, if I want,
• 03:36 though I don't want anything, I've got defaults unknown if you want to.
• 03:41 I'm actually going to leave it unchecked.
• 03:44 I'm going to go for footer of the last section.
• 03:47 I'm actually going to put the file name.
• 03:50 On the right one, I'm going to put the actual date and press enter and then,
• 03:55 put time and here, I'm going to have page of however many pages there are in here.
• 04:03 Steve wants an ID, he can keep a running total.
• 04:06 I click OK, that will give me how it looks and you gonna see it here.
• 04:09 Now, this is very important, this scale with document, if you uncheck that
• 04:15 that can actually be quite useful because sometimes when you print out pages,
• 04:19 sometimes you have to shrink on the pages slightly to fit it all on one page.
• 04:23 If you do that and you have scale with document.
• 04:27 The actual filter will shrink, but it's nice to have it consistent on each one.
• 04:32 So often, you want to have that unchecked, just a tip.
• 04:37 Once you're happy, you just click okay.
• 04:39 Order, brilliant and it's just waring through.
• 04:44 I've got one sheet, as I've mentioned already, the cells assumption sheet.
• 04:47 Look, I've got this whooping big line in here.
• 04:49 You'd want to do this on each sheet to make sure that it goes through, so
• 04:52 you can actually highlight all the sheets.
• 04:56 So, what I would do is highlight all the sheets and
• 05:00 you can go click on here and print preview.
• 05:03 It's one way of doing it and, depending on your printer, you can scroll through.
• 05:08 See just how good or bad it looks and you get an idea of what looks good.
• 05:14 Yeah, it looks like a good sheet doesn't it?
• 05:16 And you can see what things you need to fix.
• 05:19 So, you go to those sheets and fix them.
• 05:22 Now, given I can't go on for 20 minutes in this video,
• 05:25 I'm actually going to just look at the sales assumption sheet.
• 05:28 And you can see that this dotted line shown doesn't look light as it is.
• 05:31 Notice if I actually put this in a page break view,
• 05:35 so I've got normal here, page layout and here's page break preview.
• 05:39 You can see it's looking.
• 05:41 Now, I can drag this across, quite like that and it will widen it
• 05:48 and then I could say, this is looking yucky.
• 05:51 I've domestic and overseas and then, of course,
• 05:54 a particular liamism, underseas here and then, overall.
• 05:57 Wouldn't it be good if I surely put that there?
• 06:01 Why is that gray line down here?
• 06:02 This is one of the problems with this.
• 06:05 Try to get the blue line in the right place,
• 06:06 that grey line doesn't show in the right place.
• 06:09 It's a nice little bug in Excel that doesn't happen on every machine, but
• 06:13 can infuriate.
• 06:15 And so, if I now go and have a look at that in print preview mode.
• 06:20 Yeah, looks good.
• 06:24 Missing the targets.
• 06:27 Now, how do I get to repeat titles?
• 06:28 I think I'll go back to the print titles button on the page layout tab.
• 06:33 Here, what I can actually do is seek rows to repeat at top.
• 06:39 I want to actually highlight rows 1 to the line below 10.
• 06:44 Click.
• 06:45 Print preview.
• 06:51 Wunderbar, looks good.
• 06:53 And that's the process you have to go through.
• 06:56 Look, you can't just sort of shirk on this, you've got to do it.
• 07:00 So, do remember to put this together because then,
• 07:02 when people print it out, it will look more professional.
• 07:05 You can annoy people when you don't put time into thinking
• 07:08 about how it's going to look printed out.
• 07:11 Practice it yourself.
• 07:12 That's a guide to printing and viewing.
• 07:15 Next time, we'll be looking at linking.

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