Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Change the way your worksheet appears onscreen. Customize the way data appears when printed.
Quick reference
Putting It All Together
Change the way your worksheet appears onscreen. Customize the way data appears when printed
When to use
Learn methods for fitting your data onto one sheet for printing. Add headers and footers to your document
Instructions
Adjust page breaks
Automatic page breaks are shown as dotted lines. Dragging automatic page break lines turns the lines solid.
Add a header or footer
Type a header or footer directly into the document from the Page Layout view
Change page orientation
- Go to Page Layout tab
- Click Orientation and select ‘Portrait’ or ‘Landscape’ from the dropdown menu
Change document scale
Stretch or shrink your printout by typing a scale percentage in the ‘Scale to Fit’ command group
Print gridlines and/or column and row headings
- Go to Page Layout tab
- Check the ‘Print’ checkbox(es) on the Sheet Options command group
- 00:04 If you've created a file from scratch, naturally,
- 00:07 you'll want to save your data so you can come back to it later.
- 00:11 It's not that different from any other Microsoft document.
- 00:14 You use Save As to save your file for the first time and
- 00:17 Save to preserve any changes to the document after that.
- 00:22 But what if you wanted to set up your file for printing?
- 00:25 Well, that's a little different from Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.
- 00:30 Those programs for the most part actively try to format your information
- 00:34 to fit onto pages of a certain size.
- 00:37 But due to the nature of Excel, Excel goes to over a million rows and
- 00:41 over 16,000 columns.
- 00:43 And you can easily see that the data you type will probably turn out
- 00:47 other than you expect unless you format your page layout yourself.
- 00:52 So before attempting to print, it's a good idea to go to the View tab.
- 00:59 Within the Workbook Views command group, there are a few options for
- 01:03 how we want to look at our worksheet.
- 01:05 The first thing to remember is that you can make changes to the content of your
- 01:09 worksheet as normal while you're working in any view.
- 01:12 They're just alternative ways to look at your worksheet.
- 01:16 The default is normal, which is the view that we've been working with.
- 01:19 Let's look at the others.
- 01:22 First, the Page Break Preview.
- 01:24 This view emphasizes where your pages will be broken.
- 01:27 Let's click on that.
- 01:29 And we see that dotted lines show where the automatic page breaks will be, and
- 01:34 the solid lines show the manual breaks.
- 01:37 If you move the automatic page breaks, then they're displayed as solid lines,
- 01:43 because then they become manual breaks.
- 01:46 And the outer limits of our page are displayed as solid lines too.
- 01:51 We Ctrl+Z to undo our last action, and we've restored our natural page break.
- 01:59 Page numbers are displayed as gray watermarks.
- 02:01 So we have Page 1 and Page 2 here.
- 02:04 As you can see, the setup for this sheet isn't ideal,
- 02:07 because some of our data is spilling over from Page 1 to Page 2.
- 02:11 And this is definitely not what we want.
- 02:13 We have a couple of options.
- 02:15 The first temptation is just to drag the automatic page break all the way over
- 02:20 to the end of our data set.
- 02:22 Everything now fits on one sheet, it's all Page 1, so everything looks great.
- 02:27 But what exactly did we just do?
- 02:30 Let's see.
- 02:32 We go to our Page Layout tab and we see that what we've done is to
- 02:36 reduce our printout scale to 78% of its original size.
- 02:42 This may work fine for some pieces of data, but it may be a bad idea for others.
- 02:47 Depending on what your data is, and how good and
- 02:50 useful it'll be at that scaled down size.
- 02:53 For this document, maybe 78% isn't such a good idea,
- 02:58 because it has lots of numbers and text.
- 03:00 So let's go back to our 100%.
- 03:05 And we still have the problem of data spilling over into a second page.
- 03:10 Well, another option is just to change our page orientation.
- 03:14 Let's do that.
- 03:16 Maybe your data would fit better on a landscape size page than on portrait.
- 03:20 Let's click Landscape.
- 03:23 And it does, it fits perfectly.
- 03:25 So that's a good solution for this data type.
- 03:29 Let's take a look at our third view, the Page Layout View.
- 03:35 This view is somewhat similar to the Page Break View,
- 03:37 in that it shows you where the page breaks are.
- 03:42 We can zoom in.
- 03:44 Right now it's showing 55% because it wants to show us the entire page.
- 03:49 But we can zoom in a little more so that we can see our data.
- 03:53 Now we're at 75%.
- 03:55 The Page Layout View also shows us our ruler,
- 03:59 making it easy to adjust page margins, and it enables us to add headers and footers.
- 04:05 The header is a section of the workbook that appears in the top margin, and
- 04:09 the footer appears in the bottom margin.
- 04:13 Headers and footers are printed on your document.
- 04:16 So you can type whatever you like within your header and it will appear as a title.
- 04:21 And you can format this to the size and font of your choice.
- 04:25 So let's create a header here.
- 04:27 Let's call it Top Achievers, and since it's a title,
- 04:30 let's make it a little bigger.
- 04:32 So we can make this 16 point and maybe bold, and
- 04:37 that will be our header when our page is printed.
- 04:45 If we go back to Page Layout,
- 04:47 we can also choose to print our gridlines and our headings.
- 04:53 This means that when our sheet is printed, it will print with these lines, and
- 04:57 it will print with the A, B, C columns and the 1, 2, 3 row numbers.
- 05:01 If we don't want that, then we just uncheck and they won't be shown.
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