How to Print and Use Printing Features in Microsoft Excel 2016
During this Microsoft Excel 2016 training tutorial video, discover printing options when printing from Excel 2016.
Video Transcript
In this section we’re going to take a look at printing and the time is almost certain to come when you’re going to want to print out one or more of your worksheets. And one important point I need to make at the outset is that exactly what you can do when you’re printing will to some extent depend on your printer. Now modern printers attached to most people’s home or work PCs tend to be very capable but if you have an older printer then some of the things that I’m going to talk about in this section may not be possible for you.
Now the first thing I want to point out is that when you print something, supposing I just printed this worksheet, the top 50 movies worksheet, what Excel prints by default is just the content of the cells that have got something in them. It doesn’t print sort of thousands of columns and thousands of rows that are empty. So you don’t have to worry too much about thinking well if I hit the Print button am I going to get all this empty stuff printed as well. Having said that you also can have very tight control over what is printed. So if I wanted to print those empty columns I could. I’d just have to do one or two things to achieve that.
Now the next thing to point out is that as with many other things related to Excel there is a sort of default, straightforward, one click version and that’s what we’re going to look at first. And then you have the option of selecting some specific features for printing and making the print happen in a certain way.
So one very quick option for printing is on the Quick Access Toolbar if you’ve got this button enabled. You will see that mine says Quick Print and then in brackets afterwards it gives the name of the device that it would print this worksheet to if I just clicked this Quick Print button. If you have the Quick Print button enabled on your Quick Access Toolbar you should see a Tool Tip similar to that. But in your case it will give the name of either your printer or some other option for printing. I’ll explain what I mean by that in a moment.
So one option is to click and it will print but that’s not quite the option I’m going to go for because what I’m actually going to do is to go into Backstage View and then go to the Print Page because I want to explain some of the settings on the Print Page. I very rarely just hit the Quick Print button because I almost always need to check the Print Settings on this page in Backstage View.
Now first of all on the right I have a preview of how my print would look if I just hit Print now. There is a big Print button there which would do the equivalent of what that Quick Print button does on the Quick Access Toolbar. So if I just hit that button now what I would see on my printer is what’s on the right. Just below and to the left of the page on the right there is a little Page Control. So it currently says Page 1 of 2, current page. So it means I would see two pages. There are just four movies on the second page. Most of them fitted on the first page. So I probably wouldn’t like that anyway. I’d probably want to squeeze everything onto one page but I’ll come back to that in a moment.
So that’s my Print Preview on the right. That shows me what I would see. Now let’s look at this left hand column. It’s got the word Print at the top and that Print button. I want to go through these main options.
First of all the number of copies, well it defaults to one but you can either type a number in or you can use the roller buttons to go to the number of copies that you want. And below that we have Printer. Now when I showed you the Tool Tip for the Quick Print button now I pointed out that it said HPPSE2500 Series Printer. That’s my default printer from this work station. And when you hover over the print device that’s going to be used you will often see a Tool Tip like that. Now if I click on the right, this little dropdown arrow on the right, you’ll see that I’ve actually got a choice of devices to print to. And you will also have a choice of devices to print to. Only that one in my case is physically a printer. I have a number of other print devices, none of which are physically printers. So I have a fax device. I have an option to print to PDF. So I could actually print this into a PDF file, a file in Adobe PDF format or a Microsoft XPS document. That’s Microsoft’s equivalent of PDF. Or I can send it to OneNote 16 which is basically OneNote 2016. Also if I want to add a printer, perhaps a network printer to use a different printer I’ve got an Add Printer option. And I also have the option of printing this straight to a file.
Now I’m going to stick with the physical printer at the moment but it’s important to recognize the other options that you have on your device.
Now depending on the print device that I’ve chosen I will often see a Printer Properties button here. If I click on that it normally brings up a dialogue that lets me set my printer properties. Depending on the printer that you’re using the dialogue will say different things. Mine’s quite an old color printer so I have a few pages of options here where I can do things like check the color management settings, specify the paper quality, and then I can look for affects like whether I want things to be printed actual size, whether I want them to be zoomed or percentage of normal size and so on. And I can also choose things like the orientation, portrait or landscape. I’ll come back to that in a moment. And then I can also choose any specific color settings. But for the moment I’m not going to change any of those options. I’m going to go with the defaults. Exactly what you see here will depend on your printer. It’s very unlikely to be the same as mine.
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So moving on down the settings, the next setting is which sheets do you want to print? By default it says Print active sheets. I’ve only got one worksheet in this workbook so it’s only going to print that one active sheet. But I could say Print entire workbook and then it would print every sheet in the workbook. I could also make a selection on the sheet and I could say Print that selection. Now in that way if I wanted, for example, to print some extra sheets or perhaps I just wanted to print part of this list, say the top 30, I could select those first and then say Print Selection.
I can also set up what’s called a Print Area and I could fix this as a selected area on my worksheet and I could print the print area. In fact you could also have an option here to say Ignore the print area. So if I’d set up a print area, which is a separate operation, I could at this point say ignore it.
Now if I’ve looked at my preview and it covers many pages I can also specify here that I only want say the first two pages, page one to two. And then I could also say whether I want the pages collated or not. So if it was a ten page print and I wanted six copies. Do I want the copies collated or not?
At the moment I have portrait orientation. I could switch to landscape orientation. Let’s try that. Look what happens in our preview. It’s still two pages but now it’s in landscape orientation.
I choose the Paper Size. In the UK and Europe it defaults to A4. If you’re in North America you may have your default paper size set to Letter. So you have a default but then you can change to an alternative size if you want to.
You can also change or set the margins. Now you can do that here but you can also do it using Options on the tab. And I’m actually going to show you that a little bit later on. So we’ll come back to that in a moment.
And finally we have here No Scaling. Do you want to scale, so print the sheets at their actual size, or do you want to fit the sheets on one page, shrink the printout so that it fits on one page? Now this is one of the things that isn’t necessarily available with your printer. It will to some extent depend on the capabilities of your printer but it’s normally possible. You note how it’s managed to fit that on to one page. Of course it’s done it by making all the print a lot smaller. If I go back to portrait it’s one page but it’s obviously shrunk it all slightly to fit it.
So the other options down here include Fit all the columns on one page or fit all the rows on one page. If you choose either of those it’ll concentrate on getting either columns or rows on one page but the others may sort of spill over. And you also have some custom scaling options here if you want to adjust the whole thing to fit a certain number of pages, for example.
So there are many, many options there. And exactly what you get will to some extent depend on your printer. But basically when you’ve made all of those selections what you then need to do is to just hit the Print button and you will get, hopefully, the printout that you’ve requested.
So let’s just look at a couple of other options. Let’s go back into the worksheet itself now and let’s go to the View Tab again and switch to Page Layout View.
Now having gone into Page Layout View let me just zoom out a little and you see that many of the pages here are grayed out. These will not actually be printed. But when you’re in Page Layout View you can actually do quite a bit of the work you would do in Normal Excel View. So for instance I could add more movies to my list here. And you notice how the grayed out pages say Click to Add Data. So you can work in Page Layout View. Now there are certain things you can’t do but there are some things that you can do very well. Let’s go back to 100% again.
Now I mentioned just now when we were looking at the Print Page in Backstage View that you could set margins. Well you can set margins in Page Layout View. If I select the Page Layout Tab on the Ribbon one of the options is Margins. If I click on Margins I have a set of standard margins. So Normal, Wide, Narrow. I can also set Custom Margins. Let’s suppose that I’ve decided here to set Wide Margins. Now you probably noticed the change in the margins now. But not only can I go back in there if I want to and see that I’ve got Wide Margins set, you can select it on the list there. But I can also in Page Layout View manually set the margins.
So if I go here to this sort of mini ruler along the top here, this edge here is the right margin. Note the Tool Tip. And I could actually change that right margin like that or indeed go back and change the left margin. And then if I look back at the Margins Command here I’ll see now that I’ve got Custom Margins selected.
So as you can see in Page Layout View you can actually adjust the look of the pages in a very sort of look and feel, interactive kind of way.
Now this even extends to being able to change the contents of the sheet itself. So for instance, let’s suppose that I wanted that title column in my table to be wider. I’ve got plenty of room on the right. So what I could do is go up here to where it indicates columns A and B and I can change the column widths. And again it’s interactive and visual.
So there really are a lot of things that you can in Page Layout View that let you customize how your pages look when they’re printed.
And one other thing you can do. I’m just going to give you a quick demonstration of this. What about adding a Header?
Now if I click here in Add Header not only am I given a space to enter a header into but I get one of those Contextual Tabs that I mentioned towards the beginning of the course. And the tab is a Design Tab and it’s part of what’s called the Header and Footer Tools.
Now having done that not only could I type a title for my pages in here but I could insert one of the standard and footer elements. So for instance, I could insert the file name. Click File Name, that’s inserted there. Now it may not look like the file name but it’s actually a code that goes in there and when you printout you would see the file name. In this case Top 50.xlsx. And if I wanted to put something in the footer, if I click on Go to Footer it takes me to the bottom of the page and maybe in there I could put the current date. And again a code goes in for the current date. And when I print those pages I’ll see the current date.
Now having entered the header and footer anytime you want to go back in and do some more work on it you can just click in there and you get the Header and Footer Tools Design Tab again which means you could insert one of those standard elements or indeed as I say you can type what you want not only into that center box but there’s also a left side and a right side.
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And I mentioned just now that these are actually codes that go into the header and footer here to indicate things like the file name and the date. If you go into Backstage View again to the Print Page you do actually see the page as it would appear printed. So you get the actual file name and the actual date there, which means that you can check exactly what you’re going to get.
That’s the end of this section. Please join me in the next one.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
