Excel Tips and Tricks #503 – Printing under pressure, super quick presentation tips

Here is the scenario: you’re asked to print out a spreadsheet for an important meeting, and the meeting starts in 2 minutes. You haven’t been given any notice and haven’t yet considered how your beautifully crafted spreadsheet might look on a physical piece of paper.

You press Ctrl+P and find a truncated section of your data, sitting uncomfortably on the page and looking very sorry for itself. You know there’s a bunch of print settings but don’t have time to go through and update them all.

Fear not because in this article we walk through the essential print options that can be updated in super quick time to get something professional looking on the page!

Print selection – what do you actually need to print?

It is easier to manage less data on a page rather than trying to cram in too much (and those with poor eyesight will thank you!)

If you have rows and columns in amongst your data that you don’t need to print, now is the time to hide them.

If you don’t need to print the whole active worksheet then you can select a smaller range of cells within the sheet. 

Select the relevant cells then choose “Print Selection” under Settings before printing.

If you need to print multiple tabs you can save time by selecting multiple tabs at once before going to print. 

Excel will then print all tabs in a single print run rather than you needing to print each tab individually.

Page layout – how is this actually going to fit on a piece of paper?

Changing the page orientation to landscape is better suited to presenting data where you have a lot of columns to fit on the page.

Avoid fiddly adjustments with page breaks and go with the “Scale to Fit” options, also on the Page Layout tab.

If you are still struggling to fit everything on the page quickly reduce your margin size.

Bonus points awarded for professional touches!

Keyboard shortcut fans access the Page Setup options by pressing Alt+P, followed by S then P.

Page numbers are great for print outs, especially if there are no staples to hand!

Navigate to the Header/Footer tab and choose one of the preset options from the drop down under Header or Footer.

Print titles is a great option if you have a table of data and want to repeat the titles and column headings on each page.

This can be found under the Sheet tab in Print Options.

Final thoughts

Remember also that the same principles apply when printing to PDF, which can be a useful tool when you need to share a static copy of your spreadsheet.

In any case, for those reporting to managers in an organisation who want and expect immediate access to data, it pays to sort out the page layout in advance!