Printing Worksheets, Workbooks, and Ranges

Printing Ranges & Worksheets

While fewer and fewer worksheets are printed these days – people simply share the workbooks by email by attaching the file or pasting a link to a cloud storage location inside the message – there will be times you need a hardcopy of your workbook, worksheets, or a selection within them.

To print the active worksheet, choose the Print command from the File tab. In the resulting view, you’ll see Excel assumes you want to print the worksheet you were in when you selected the Print command.

To print some or all of your open workbook, you have several options:

You can start by choosing how many copies you want to print, and which printer you want the print job to go to – the options you see will vary from mine, to include printers you have direct or Wi-Fi access to.

From within the options shown, you can expand the print job to include the whole workbook, or to print a selection within the active sheet – which you’d have to have made before issuing the Print command.

Here, I’m choosing to print the whole workbook. As you can see, I now have more pages that will print, referring to the number of pages listed at the bottom of the preview. I can click through the pages to see how the printout will look – what falls on which page, etc...

If I leave the Print options and go back to the worksheet, notice that I can select a range and then when I go back to the File tab and click Print, I can adjust my settings to choose Print Selection – and then only that selection shows as what’s about to print.

Switching back to printing just the active sheet, if your worksheet, when printed, would be more than one page, you can choose which pages to print – and if you’re not sure how those pages would lay out, use the page numbers at the bottom of the screen to see how many pages and where the content falls on each page.

If you don’t like that layout – as you can see in my case, there’s an awkward overflow of just part of the worksheet content onto a second page – you can adjust the orientation, margins, and scaling options. You can also choose a different paper size, but that’ll only work if you have that size paper available for your printer.

Adjusting the orientation can be your solution if the problem is that all the columns don’t fit width-wise on the page – so switching to Landscape orientation might solve my problem.

If that doesn’t work, or if it’s a length as well as width issue, adjusting the margins may help if the parts that don’t fit on one page are small – just one column or just a few rows. Here, from the list, I’m choosing Narrow Margins to give myself more room.

Well, that didn’t work, so for a bigger change, you can adjust the Scaling – avoiding making things so small you can’t read them, but shrinking the content so it fits on one page. From the choices offered, since I’m dealing with a width issue, I’ll choose Fit All Columns on One Page.

Another option, Custom Scaling Options, the choice at the bottom of the list, opens a dialog box where you can set a custom percentage of the normal size – but be careful about choosing anything lower than 75%, as you will most likely end up with a printout with type so tiny you can’t read it.

Many times, you’ll need to use more than one setting. You might need to change the orientation, widen the margins, and then also make a slight change to the scaling – it all depends on what you want to print and what size paper you’re using.