Microsoft Excel MO-200 – Level 2, Section 4 – Configure Excel worksheets and workbooks to print

1. Printing individual worksheets

Hello and welcome to session four of level two. I’m going to use this workbook which is attached to this video as a resource. However, if you’ve just finished session three, then it’s exactly the same workbook so you don’t need to download it. Now let’s put this scenario you have finished with your spreadsheet. It looks on screen how you want.

Maybe it’s time am now to print and we can go to file print. Now first of all we’ll be seeing a print preview and this shows how many pages you’ll be printing, 34 of them. And you can scroll down and you can see what you’re getting. Equally, you can have a look at the options. For example, you may have a Microsoft Print to PDF printer that will print your spreadsheet to a PDF. Or you might have a real physical printer or you might have a network printer. Let’s have a look at some of the other options. I’ll just skip the next one just for now. So do you want to print one sided or both sided? If you’re printing multiple copies, you might want to collect them. So in other words, let’s say you’re printing five copies of a four page document.

Do you want it to come out pages one 2341-234-1234 or do you want it to go one, one, two? That’s how the difference between collated and uncollated. You can also change the orientation from peltrate to landscape. You can also change the paper size and you can change the margins. There’s also a page setup but I’ll be going through this dialog box in another video.

Now, suppose there were printers specific properties for your printer. For example, you might want to print in color, black and white. You can click on the printer properties box and the dialog box for your printer will come up. It will look completely different to mine, but hopefully you know what settings you want and once you’ve done everything, click Print and hey, presto your document is printed. You can also if you want to add a quick print and a print preview and print options to your quick access toolbar. So if you want to use print quickly, you can add it there as well.

2. Printing an entire workbook and printing a selection

Now, you’re not only limited to printing out one spreadsheet at once, you can print out multiple spreadsheets. So we’ve got one tab highlighted and as you know, you can select another one. You can hold down the shift key and select two of them or all. Or you can select it can hold down the control key and that can select two disparate ones as well. Remember, a shift key goes from one place to another inclusive, whereas a control will go one spreadsheet and then add a second spreadsheet anywhere else. Either way, you are grouping. And we’ve talked about that in a previous session. And now you can go to File Print and it’s now printing 35 pages. Because it’s now printing two different tabs, it’s printing the active tabs. But suppose you wanted the entire workbook printed.

Well, without grouping. You could print the entire workbook in this dropdown. So we’ll get rid of all of this grouping by clicking on a sheet that is not part of the group and we’ll go back to File Print so I can print the entire workbook. And now that’s 36 pages, 34 in the first sheet and one in the other two. Now, there is a third option here, which is printing the selection. So suppose I was just to highlight four cells and go File Print and Print selection. We’d literally just be printing four cells. Now, you might be wondering why there’s additional rose printing as well. What? This is all to do with the page setup. And we’re going to have a look at page setup in the next few videos.

3. Setting a print area

In our previous video, we were printing a very small selection on a onetime basis. But what if instead of printing the entirety of the sheet 34 pages, you just wanted to print a smaller part on a fulltime basis? In other words, the default where you can do this wave page layout and print area, we can set a print area. So to set it, first of all, we need to highlight the area. So let’s say I just wanted the first four columns and the first 1718 rows to be printed out. So I can now go to print area within page layout and go set page layout. Notice what’s happened. It’s very difficult actually to see anything that’s happened. But if we go into page break preview, we can now see that this area is surrounded by the darker blue box and everything else is grayed out that will not be printed.

Now we can adjust this by adjusting the size of the box in page break preview. So now we can see it’s on two pages, very small page two there. And now we’re back to one. Now you can change this down to a single cell if you want to, but I don’t recommend it and neither does Excel. It’s a lot to just select and print an entire page for just the one cell. So you can also clear the print area so that will reset it to the full area. So maybe I want to select a new section. So I’ll select all of that and I’ll go to Page Layout print area, set print Area.

So that will restrict the printing to just this area. And if I go to file print, you can see that it is just going to print out the area that I have highlighted and I don’t need to highlight it. Now I can go to highlight a completely different area and that is the default.

So it’s very difficult to see this in the normal. It used to be easier, but there is this very thin line that I really can’t see at the moment. If I extend this maybe to N, it used to be on other versions of Excel you can see this line much easier, but now it’s a lot more difficult in this version, especially with all of the that have got around much easier. If you want a visible representation of your work that you’re going to print, that you go to Page break layout.