Cool excel printing options

Excel offers some cool options for printing worksheets. Here are six of my favorite techniques:

1 Printing grid lines (or not)



To print grid lines on your final printout, choose File, Page Setup, Sheet tab and enable the Gridlines checkbox. This prints horizontal and vertical lines much like you see on the screen in editing view.

2 Printing row and column headings


To print the letters A, B, C etc above the columns on your worksheet and the row numbers choose File, Page Setup, Sheet tab and enable the Row and column headings checkbox. This works particularly well when combined with printing Gridlines but can be used without gridlines too.

3 Setting your own page margins


You can configure the margins around the page by choosing File, Page Setup, Margins tab. Set the margin values and use the Horizontal and/or Vertical checkboxes to centre a small worksheet on a larger page.

4 Drag a margin into place


You can also control margins from the Print Preview screen. Click Margins to turn the margin indicators on. You can now move these into new positions by simply dragging on them.

5 Select an area to print


When a print area is set, this will print by default regardless of how big the worksheet is. Drag over the area to use and choose File, Print Area, Set Print Area to configure it. To clear the print area, so you can print the entire worksheet, choose File, Print Area, Clear Print Area.

6 Print a chart


When you click a chart on a worksheet to select it and choose File, Page Setup, the page setup dialog shows no longer contains the Sheet tab and, instead, contains a Chart tab. This shows options for sizing and printing charts. When you click Print, only the chart will print.