Fit Print to Page, and Adjustments to Layout

Location: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/fitprint.htm      
Home page: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/excel.htm
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Getting a Better Page Fit

When you print a worksheet, what you print is a rectangular region, so if you do not use all the columns on some rows you could be printing blank sheets regardless of anything else.

Unless you select and area and print selection, limit with Print Area, or have hidden rows and/or columns you will print from cell A1 to your lastcell (Ctrl+End).  Excel does not keep track of the used range very well though, so if you insert rows and then delete rows, Excel remembers how many rows you had.  (more on Last Cell page.

Last Cell problems are one of the biggest problems causing lots of blank pages to be printed.  To make a particular cell become the last cell you can manually delete rows and columns at the end or to simplify things you can run a macro,  MakeLastCell.

Minor adjustments for a better fit to the page (#adjustments)

There are other tricks that you can do for minor adjustments to get things to fit a page better.

Modify the width of a column so that most data fits, and turn on cell wrap (format, cells, alignment, wrap).  You can do the same to affect the rows.  Along those lines you might select a particular range that you want to set the width of the columns to and rely on cell wrapping for the other cells.  (Format, columns, fit selection).

Width of a Column:  you can select all cells (Ctrl+A) or use the gray Select All button at the intersection of the row and column headers.  Then double click on any boundary between two row headers or column headers.  To adjust one or a few columns/rows select the columns (or rows) and double-click on the boundary before any in the selection.  You can adjust the height of a row in a similar manner.

Page Setup under File menu   (#setup)

With  Print Preview mode you can see where your margins are and that is usually the best place to work with margins and such.

 Page Setup, Page to change layout
    fit to pages high -- file, page setup, fit to __ pages wide
    fit to pages high -- file, page setup, fit to ...  pages __ tall.
     (note pages tall and pages wide are two independent settings)
    adjust margins and column widths -- file, page setup, margins, print preview

Page Setup, Sheet  affects sheet appearance such as gridlines and rows to repeat at top, and the columns to repeat at the left.
    (file, page setup, sheets),
       Columns to repeat at left: $A:$A
       Rows to repeat at Top: $1:$1 and the corresponding display option is Window, Freeze panes.

Formatting options (Format menu, cells):   (#format)

You can change the font size -- usually one would use toolbar buttons.

Alignment Formatting options

You can use Shrink to fit to shrink the text in certain cells, which can make for a very small font.  (format, cells, alignment, shrink to fit)

Excel questions not directly concerning my web pages are best directed to newsgroups
such as news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.excel.misc where Excel users all around the clock from at least 6 continents ask and answer Excel questions.  Posting suggestions and netiquette.  More information on newsgroups and searching newsgroups.    Google Groups (Usenet) Advanced Search Excel newsgroups (or search any newsgroup).
This page was introduced on October 24, 2003. 
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