Printing Worksheets

Unlike Word documents, which typically are designed to fit on specific paper sizes, Excel worksheets are free-flowing environments that sprawl in every direction. If you press Ctrl+P and leave the formatting to Excel, you’ll end up with page breaks that appear at arbitrary locations in your worksheet, with no regard to content. To properly translate a large worksheet into printed output takes planning and a fair amount of creative formatting.

If you don’t specifically define a print area, Excel assumes that you want to print all the data in the currently selected worksheet(s), beginning with cell A1 and extending to the edge of the area that contains data or formatting. If necessary, you can divide a worksheet into smaller sections and print each region on its own page. As explained in this section, you can also shrink the print area to fit in a precise number of pages, and you can repeat row and column headings to make the display of data easier to follow.