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.
• 00:10 First, a touch of bad news.
• 00:13 If you have this nice view set up, for example, with the timeline at the top and
• 00:17 the homeowner view at the bottom, you can only print the selected view.
• 00:22 So I'll go to File > Print, and
• 00:24 you can see the timeline does not exist in the print preview.
• 00:29 So you can only print the selected view.
• 00:31 Now how do you know what the view is that's selected?
• 00:34 Well, you can see over here, homeowner view, that's highlighted in a dark green.
• 00:38 If I come up here, there's a timeline view.
• 00:41 If I click here, you can see that's the dark green now.
• 00:44 Might be a little bit difficult to see on the screen, but
• 00:47 I'm just clicking on the words, and that's highlighting the selected view.
• 00:52 So now if I click on File > Print, I'm printing the timeline instead.
• 00:57 As I just showed you, printing the timeline is pretty straightforward.
• 01:01 You just go File > Print, and it usually fits on the screen, and
• 01:05 you can easily get that printed.
• 01:07 So we're going to focus right now on the Gantt chart, click the View tab and
• 01:12 remove the timeline.
• 01:14 So now let's go to File > Print.
• 01:17 And the first thing you'll notice,
• 01:20 down here in the bottom left hand side of the print preview, it says 1 of 4 pages.
• 01:26 Well, what's this 1 of 4 pages?
• 01:28 Come over here to the far right hand side of the page, and
• 01:32 click this little multi pages icon.
• 01:35 And when you click that, what you'll see is these are the pages that
• 01:39 are going to be printed from our printer.
• 01:42 So what it's looking like is it can't fit all of the tasks on one page, so
• 01:46 it scrolls down and completes the tasks on another page.
• 01:50 That's okay, but now it's printing the Gantt chart over here, on two other pages.
• 01:55 So what this means is I'm actually going to have to print this and tape or
• 02:00 staple or something to get all these pages together.
• 02:03 Now if you're lucky enough to have a plotter, or some larger paper,
• 02:08 then certainly make use of that.
• 02:10 But let's assume you only have your standard 8.5 x 11 US paper, or
• 02:14 8 x 10, something along those lines.
• 02:17 Go ahead and click the Page Setup link.
• 02:21 And the first thing we're going to do is go to the Page tab.
• 02:25 I'm going to tell Project I want it to fit
• 02:30 to 1 page wide by 2 tall, and click OK.
• 02:35 Now you can see I have the tasks on the two pages, but
• 02:40 Project has shrunk everything to fit it all onto two pages.
• 02:46 So I'll go ahead and enlarge this by coming over here to the one page icon.
• 02:51 So right now we have this multiple pages icon selected,
• 02:55 we'll click on the one page.
• 02:57 And so now you can see kind of what Project did, it shrunk the font down.
• 03:01 It's possible that this will print just fine in your printer, or
• 03:06 it could be that the font is too small.
• 03:08 So if that's the case, you're going to have to decide whether you want
• 03:13 to create another view that has less fields.
• 03:15 Or if you want to maybe create a view that doesn't even have the Gantt chart at all.
• 03:19 Or print multiple pages, and allow it to print the four,
• 03:23 so you can tape them together after they're printed.
• 03:26 So as you can see, there's going to be some trial and error when you're printing.
• 03:31 Don't get too frustrated, just keep trying these settings using the Page Setup link.
• 03:36 Now the last thing I'm going to talk about is printing reports.
• 03:39 So I'm going to press the Escape key, I'm going to go to the Report tab,
• 03:44 and I'll choose In Progress, and I'll choose Milestone Report.
• 03:49 Now I'm going to go File > Print to print this, see how it's cut off?
• 03:54 This is an out-of-the-box report that Microsoft created.
• 03:57 Microsoft created these so that they look good on screen.
• 04:01 They don't necessarily create them so they look good on a printer.
• 04:05 And you have to think about that when you're creating your own reports.
• 04:09 I just press the Escape key to come back.
• 04:12 Now I'll click the Report tab, and I'll click Custom, and
• 04:16 choose My Milestone Report.
• 04:18 So now if I want to print this, I can go File > Print.
• 04:23 See how it's off to the right?
• 04:25 The onscreen view and the print view are slightly different.
• 04:29 I'm going to press Escape.
• 04:31 Make sure that when you're creating your reports, if you think you're going to
• 04:36 print them, that you just kind of grab everything and move them up to the left.
• 04:40 This way you know that it's not going to be cut off and
• 04:44 cause you printing problems later.
• 04:46 You can resize the fonts here.
• 04:49 So if you click inside of a table, and then just click the edge, so you select
• 04:54 the entire table, you can click the Task tab, and you can change the font size.
• 04:59 And then you can shrink the table and give yourself even
• 05:04 more printing area, can shrink the titles as well.
• 05:09 And then when I go to File > Print, you can see it prints on the left and the top.
• 05:14 And I even have some more space to put some more report details if I want to.
• 05:18 I'll press the Escape key, and now I'm back to the report.
• 05:23 So when you're designing your reports,
• 05:25 make sure that you consider whether you're going to print them.
• 05:27 And if you are, start at this top left hand side first.

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