Tips and Tricks for Printing

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this tips and tricks lesson,
• 00:06 I'm going to show you how Microsoft Project handles printing.
• 00:12 First, a touch of bad news.
• 00:14 If you have this nice view set up, for example, with a timeline at the top and
• 00:18 the homeowner view at the bottom, you can only print the selected view, so
• 00:23 I'll go to File > Print.
• 00:25 And you can see the timeline does not exist in the print preview.
• 00:30 So, you can only print the selected view.
• 00:32 Now, how do you know what the view is that's selected?
• 00:35 Well, you can see over here, Homeowner View, that's highlighted in a dark green.
• 00:40 If I come up here, there's a timeline view.
• 00:42 If I click here, you can see that's the dark green now.
• 00:45 Might be a little bit difficult to see on the screen.
• 00:48 But I'm just clicking on the words, and that's highlighting the selected view.
• 00:53 So now if I click on File > Print, I'm printing the timeline instead.
• 00:59 As I just showed you, printing the timeline is pretty straightforward.
• 01:02 You just go File > Print.
• 01:04 And it usually fits on the screen and you can easily get that printed.
• 01:09 So we're going to focus right now on the Gantt chart.
• 01:11 Click the View tab and remove the timeline.
• 01:15 So now let's go to File > Print.
• 01:19 And the first thing you'll notice,
• 01:21 down here on the bottom left hand side of the Print Preview, it says 1 of 4 pages.
• 01:27 Well, what's this 1 of 4 pages?
• 01:30 Come over here to the far right-hand side of the page and
• 01:33 click this little multi-pages icon.
• 01:37 And when you click that, what you'll see
• 01:40 is these are the pages that are going to be printed from our printer.
• 01:44 So what it's looking like is, it can't fit all of the tasks on one page, so
• 01:49 it scrolls down and completes the task on another page.
• 01:52 That's okay.
• 01:54 But now it's printing the Gantt chart over here on two other pages.
• 01:58 So what this means is I'm actually going to have to print this and tape or
• 02:02 staple or something to get all these pages together.
• 02:05 Now if you're lucky enough to have a plotter or
• 02:08 some larger paper, then certainly make use of that.
• 02:12 Well, let's assume you only have your standard eight and
• 02:14 a half by eleven US paper, or eight by ten, something along those lines.
• 02:20 Go ahead and click the Page Setup link.
• 02:25 And the first thing we're gonna do is go to the Page tab.
• 02:30 I'm going to tell Project,
• 02:33 I want it to fit to 1 page wide by 2 tall.
• 02:39 And click OK.
• 02:42 Now you can see I have the tasks on the two pages,
• 02:46 but Project has shrunk everything to fit it all onto two pages.
• 02:53 So I'll go ahead and enlarge this by coming over here to the one page icon.
• 02:58 So right now we have this multiple pages icon selected,
• 03:01 we'll click on the one page.
• 03:03 And so now you can see kind of what Project did.
• 03:06 It shrunk the font down.
• 03:09 As a matter of fact, I can tell that it's shrunken, shrinked, whatever the word is.
• 03:13 Go ahead and click the Page Setup link here.
• 03:17 And you can see that even though adjust to isn't selected,
• 03:21 it's actually Microsoft Project is telling you that it shrunk the image by 86%.
• 03:28 So it's possible, I'll press the Cancel button.
• 03:31 It's possible that this will print just fine in your printer.
• 03:35 Or it could be that the font is too small.
• 03:39 So if that's the case, you're going to have to decide whether
• 03:41 you wanna create another view that has less fields.
• 03:47 Or if you wanna maybe create a view that doesn't even have the Gantt chart at all.
• 03:52 Or print multiple pages and allow it to print the four so
• 03:56 you can tape them together after they're printed.
• 04:00 So as you can see, there's going to be some trial and error when you're printing.
• 04:04 Don't get too frustrated, just keep trying these settings using the Page Setup link.
• 04:08 Now the last thing I'm gonna talk about it is printing reports.
• 04:12 So I'm going to press the ESC key.
• 04:14 I'm gonna go to the Report tab, and
• 04:17 I'll choose In Progress and I'll choose Milestone Report.
• 04:22 Now, I'm gonna go File > Print to print this.
• 04:24 See how it's cut off?
• 04:26 This is an out of the box report that Microsoft created.
• 04:30 Microsoft created these so that they look good onscreen.
• 04:33 They don't necessarily create them so they look good on a printer.
• 04:38 And you have to think about that when you're creating your own reports.
• 04:41 I just press the ESC key to come back.
• 04:44 Now I'll click the Report tab and
• 04:47 I'll click Custom, and choose My Milestone Report.
• 04:51 So now if I wanna print this, I can go File > Print.
• 04:55 See how it's off to the right?
• 04:58 The onscreen view and the print view are slightly different.
• 05:02 I'm gonna press ESC.
• 05:03 Make sure that when you're creating your reports, if you think you're gonna print
• 05:07 them, that you just kind of grab everything, and move them up to the left.
• 05:13 This way you know that it's not going to be cut off and
• 05:16 cause you printing problems later.
• 05:19 You can resize the fonts here.
• 05:21 So if you click inside of a table, and then just click the edge so you select
• 05:25 the entire table, you can click the Task tab, and you can change the font size.
• 05:32 And then you can shrink the table, and give yourself even more printing area.
• 05:38 You can shrink the titles as well.
• 05:41 And then when I go to File > Print, you can see it prints on the left, in the top.
• 05:46 And I even have some more space to put some more report details if I want to.
• 05:51 I'll press the ESC key, and now I'm back to the report.
• 05:55 So when you're designing your reports,
• 05:57 make sure that you consider whether you're going to print them.
• 06:00 And if you are, start at this top left-hand side first.

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