This article offers a description two features which are very useful when printing worksheets in Microsoft Excel: Print Titles and Set Print Area.
Print Titles
Each time you print a worksheet, Excel normally prints all the data that it contains. However, there are times when you only want to print a selection of your data. Although you can achieve this by hiding rows and columns, Excel offers a simpler solution.
For example, let’s say you have a worksheet with only five average-sized columns but several hundred rows, although the header and footer appear on every page, only page 1 will have column headings. This means that it becomes difficult to know what the figures on the other pages relate to. We can make use of Excel’s Print Titles feature to print the column headings on every page. Print Titles are in the Page Setup section of the Page Layout tab; simply click on the button and Excel displays the Page Setup dialog box with the Sheet tab activated. In our five column worksheet example, we would only need to specify the number of rows that we want to repeat at the top of every page. In our example, it would be only the first row. Having clicked to specify row one, we can click Print Preview to see the result and we would see that the headings are repeated at the top of each page.
Only one print area can be specified at a time. The Clear Print Area command will restore normal behaviour; so that, when you print, the entire worksheet will be printed.
When you print a worksheet, Excel normally prints all the data that it contains. However, there are times when you only want to print a selection of your data. Although you can achieve this by hiding rows and columns, Excel offers a simpler solution.
In the Page Layout tab of the Excel 2007 ribbon, you will find the Set Print Area drop-down menu. When you click on it, it offers two options: Set Print Area and Clear Print Area. The Set Print Area command allows you to highlight a range of data and specify that this is the only part of the worksheet that will be printed whenever you use the print command. Having chosen the Set Print Area command, Excel will now display a dotted lined border around the area that has been set, in much the same way as it normally displays the page boundaries after the print command has been used.
Only one print area can be specified at a time. The Clear Print Area command can be used to restore normal behaviour; so that, when you print, the entire worksheet will be printed.
Author is a developer and trainer with On-SiteTrainingCourses.Com, a UK IT training company offering XML and XSLT Classes in London and throughout the UK.