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

4. Page setup, Part 1 (first two tabs)

For the next few videos, we’ll be looking at one particular dialog box, the Page Setup dialog box. You may remember from my initial discussion about menus, there are some dialog boxes hidden away in the bottom right-hand corner of quite a number of sections. So if I click on this one within Page layout, page Setup here we have the Page Setup up dialog box, and you can see we’ve got lots of options that we can do. We can start our page in portrait or landscape. So portrait is bigger down rather than going across. Landscape is the opposite. We have a size. So currently we’re at 55% of normal size for the printing. Now, this is completely independent to the view size, which is currently 110. So this view size controls what you see on screen. This size here.

The 55% controls the zoom, as it were, on paper. Alternatively, you could set it up and say, I want the entirety of a page to be the entirety of the screen to be one page wide, and then it’s however many pages going down that I want. So if I click OK, you can see that the screen has excel has automatically adjusted so that the scale is 37%. I can’t now readjust it without taking off the fit by one page width. If I wanted to change it to something else, I could say print by one page by one page height if I so wished as well. Now, what percentage is actually usable? In my experience, I wouldn’t go below around 55%. So 37%, I think, is too small for people to read.

So 55%, if you’re using the standard font size, is probably about right as a minimum. So we have the portrait, the landscape, the scaling. If you use fit two, by the way, so fit to one page wide, it won’t go above 100%. If you want that, you actually have to say adjust to 110% normal size. Then we have the paper size. So it could be a British Dowel paper, a four, a five, or it could be an American size paper, letter or legal.

You also have print quality. And you can also say, well, what is the first page number? Why would you use that? Why would you say, I want the first page number to be page eight? Well, let’s suppose you’ve got a document before this. You have a Word document, which is seven pages, and you wanted this Excel workbook to be an appendix. Well, you might want to say, okay, the start of this Excel workbook is going to be page eight.

Now let’s have a look at other options. You will also have your print that will get you to the Print dialog box, print Preview that will allow you to see the print and options, gives you your printer specific options. Now, let’s go into the margins. And these are margins measured in your default units, whether that be inches or centimeters. So we currently have a default margin of zero point 75 top that means there’s going to be no printing of the main spreadsheet below zero 75.

However if you’ve got a header then you can go up to zero three so it just allows the header to start a bit higher but we’ll have a look at headers and footers in a separate video that’s not the same as the freeze panes so it’s to do with the header and footer in this third tab. Now you can also center the document horizontally and vertically on the page if you don’t do eve then any printing will start on the top left hand corner of the page so it’s basically a house style some people like the centering and some people don’t. Now I mentioned headers and footers and they will be discussed on the next video.

5. Page setup, Part 2 (Repeating headers and footers)

In the previous video I talked about headers and footers and you can edit them here in this third tab. Now you can see that there are headers and footers. And if I click on either of these custom header, custom footers you can see that there are three zones top left, top middle, top right, bottom left, bottom middle and bottom right. And you can see this in the preview that we’ve got here. Now there are these dropdown boxes, these give you some standard headers and footers but to my mind they are generally not that good. So I always use the custom header and the custom Footer. So let’s click on the custom Header. It says, created with foul cats.

Professional. That’s the name of the program that I wrote to catalog my CDs. Well let’s get rid of that. I want to say instead created by Philip Burton and we’ve got other things that we can add. If I now click OK, you can see that we can also have different odd and even pages, different footers and a different header and footer on the first page. So you could have mirror pages for instance. So on the left hand side a footer that’s left orientated and on the right hand page something that’s right orientated and it could even be blank on the first page. Quite often you don’t want headers and footers to be on the first page scale with documents. That means that if the zoom is bigger, say the scale is 150%, then the fonts will be bigger as well and align with page margins that will keep them in the appropriate pages places for the margins. I’ve always aligned with page margins.

I don’t think I’ve ever used in Excel. These first two quite useful in Microsoft Word for headers and footers to be different for different sections. But I’ve never used any of these scale with documents that’s I have used. Sometimes you’re going to insert graphics like we’ll do on the next video and you don’t want them to shrink or grow with the zoom, you want them to stay the same. So quite often I will detect this third one. Now in the next video we’ll have a look at some of the customizable things that you can do which are things that aren’t just plain text like this.

6. Adding dynamic text to headers and footers

Sometimes we want the headers and footers to react differently than just being static text. You can see that we have got at the top middle the name of the spreadsheet. The bottom right is the name of the workbook, the bottom left today’s date. And the bottom middle is a page numbering page X of Y. And you can do this with the custom headers. Now as I said there are these drop down boxes which will insert these for you and you might want to use these as a template and then modify. So let’s just have a look at what you can do. So first of all I often put in the date and time of printing out. So I do that by clicking on this which looks like a calendar, this icon and then I press a space important to put a space otherwise the date and time will be rammed together.

So you will have the year right next to the hour without a space. So there we have date and time. Now you’ll notice that there’s these little ampersands and these hard brackets. That’s fine, the computer will interpret them fine. Then the middle is page numbers. So I generally go page space and then this little page with a hash on it, a pound sign and then space of space. And then the next icon which is two pages with a hash or pound sign. And then on the right hand I quite often put the file name. Now we’ve got three different icons here. The first icon will put in the path, in other words the directory structure as well as the file name.

The second icon will just put in the file name and the third icon will put in the individual spreadsheet name. So if you rename the spreadsheet then this is dynamic text. You will get some new the up to date spreadsheet name. Now with all of this text there is also a font size button, this little A and that allows you to ensure that it is the right size. So let’s put it really big. And here you can see how much bigger this will be will really dominate the footer. But this just allows you to get exactly how you want the right color, the right underline the right font, whether it needs to be italic or bold. And you can use this in conjunction with scale with Dock document to make sure that your heads and footers are the right size.