Excel Preview Print Option
Print Preview in Excel is a tool which is used to represent what will the print output of the current page in the excel, this tool is used to see if there are any adjustments need to be made in the final output to be printed, print preview only displays the document on the screen and it does not print, in other terms it only shows us the format in which the document will be printed.
How to use Print Preview in Excel? (with an Example)
When the report is or data is ready we usually send the data online to the user. There is a situation where we need to share offline to the users by printing them. In such situations, you need to know how to print a large amount of data.
For example assume you have a large amount of data like the below.
To print this first select the entire data.
Then press the excel shortcut key Ctrl + P.
It will take us to the below window.
We can see two slabs in the above image. The left side is Print Setting Options and the right side is the Print Preview window.
We can see one more slab as well at the bottom i.e. it will show how many sheets it is going to print. In the above, it says 1 of 36 i.e. Out of thirty-six sheets print preview is visible for 1st sheet.
Now take a look at the data headers and compare them with Print Preview.
We have totally 11 headers in our data and below are the headers in order.
First_name, Last_name, Company_name, Address, City, County, State, Zip, Phone1, Phone2, and Email.
When we print this data we usually expect the data to come in single sheet only, but look at the Print Preview now.
Out of 11 headers, we could see only 4 headers, after printing these columns first then it will print remaining columns. After we got all the print copies we need to arrange them in order.
Isn’t it a frustrating job to arrange the prints in order, so for this we need to set up the page first before we print in excel.
Setup the Page to Preview Print
To set the page first, select the data first then go to Page Layout >> Print Area >> Set Print Area.
This will set what is the area we are going to print. Now Press Ctrl + P once again to see the Print Preview.
We can still see the same view. The problem here is we could be able to see only 4 columns out of 11 columns. So we need to set the setting as “Fit All Column on One Page” under page scaling.
Click on the drop-down list of “No Scaling” to view all the options.
Select “Fit All Column on One Page” to fit all the columns on one page.
Now it has fitted all the columns under one page. Since the data is large it has trimmed the size of the fonts to very small.
Even though we print this we could not be able to read the contents, so how do we overcome this issue now???
To adjust the scaling we need to change the Orientation of the page from “Portrait” to “Landscape”.
Now we can read the contents a little better than the previous one.
Now the total pages have been reduced from 36 to 13.
Like this option, we can set up the print area, adjust columns, decide on the orientation of the page and do many other settings with the help of simple Print Preview Option in excel.
Recommended Articles
This has been a guide to Print Preview in Excel. Here we will show you how to use the Print Preview feature to the full extent along with some examples. You can learn more about excel from the following articles –
- Print Labels From Excel
- Print Titles in Excel
- How to Set Print Area in Excel?
- Print Comments in Excel
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