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Printing Charts
If you have a worksheet with a chart embedded in it, you can print just the chart by selecting the chart before clicking the Office button and choosing Print. If you do not select the chart before printing, the entire worksheet including the area covered by the chart will be printed.
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Viewing Your Worksheet
Excel provides a number of views of your worksheet that help you see how it will print. To see these, click the View tab on the ribbon — by default you will be see the Normal view. The Page Layout view lets you see the document as it is intended it will print — you can see more or less of the sheet using the zoom tool in the bottom right corner of the screen.
Use Page Break view to see where the page breaks will appear in your document — these are blue dashed lines on the page. Adjust the position of the page break by dragging it up or down or to the left or the right.
Drag a page break upwards or to the left to create a page break at an earlier position than Excel was intending to do so. If you drag it down the page or to the right, Excel leaves the existing page break in place and adds another one where you drag the marker to. This is probably not what you want as it creates more pages than before.
The Custom Views option on the View tab lets you create and use custom views of your worksheet. A View can store the area of the worksheet to print and the specialist print settings from the Page Setup dialog. You can select all these options by simply selecting a view which stores these options.
For example, create a print area by selecting the area to print and choose Page Layout tab > Print Area (in the Page Setup group), and click Set Print Area. Click the View tab > Custom Views > Add to create a new view. To use the view, click the Custom Views option, select the view and click Show to apply it to the worksheet.
Using views you can configure different printing setups for your worksheets so you can, for example, create one view that prints the worksheet in landscape orientation and in color and another that prints portrait in black and white. Views can save you having to repeatedly configure and check the printing options for a worksheet.
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Multiple Sheets Per Page
If you're like tens of thousands of other Excel users you frequently lament not being able to print multiple sheets on a single sheet of paper. While Excel has no option for doing this, fortunately there is a workaround. To use it you need the Camera tool, so in Excel 2007 click the Office button > Excel Options > Customize.
From the Choose Commands From list select Commands Not In The Ribbon, locate and click the Camera icon and click Add to add the camera to the Quick Access Toolbar. (At the same time, if you miss the Print Preview button, locate and click Print Preview in the list and click Add to add it too.) Click Ok to close the dialog.
Select the first area to print and click the Camera icon to take a snapshot of the selected area. Move to a new sheet to assemble the page for printing and click to paste in the snapshot of the selected range. Repeat for other parts of the workbook that you want to print on a single sheet of paper. When you are done, print this sheet that has the assembled snapshots of your data.
The data in these snapshots is live, so if you make a change to the original data, the data in the snapshot version alters accordingly.
With a little pre-planning and some knowledge of the print options that can be configured to your advantage in Excel, you can turn your next Excel print job from an exercise in frustration to an effortlessly simple and successful procedure.
Helen Bradley is a respected international journalist writing regularly for small business and computer publications in the USA, Canada, South Africa, UK and Australia. She blogs at http://www.projectwoman.com/blogger.html.
Be sure to check out all of Helen's articles in the Exploring Office 2007 series:
