Excel’s Quick Print feature allows you to send a document to the default printer without the need of entering values in a dialog box. If the Quick Print button is not already visible on your Quick Access Toolbar, simply choose it from the Customise Quick Access Toolbar drop-down menu. You will notice that the tooltip which pops up when you position the mouse over the Quick Print button has the name of the default printer in brackets. If the printer shown is not the one you anticipated, you can simply use the regular Print command instead.
If, like a growing number of Microsoft Excel users, most of your documents are transmitted electronically, you may have Adobe PDF set up as the default printer. In this case, when you click the Quick Print button, you will be prompted to save the file since printing to Adobe PDF means creating a disc file.
Whatever your default printer, Excel always prints the document using its default settings: moderate margins, no header or footer, no column or row headings and no gridlines. If the worksheet cannot be printed on a single page, Excel will produce multiple pages moving down first and then across. Having printed the document, Excel will paginate your worksheet and subsequently will display the page boundaries as dotted lines.
Whereas Quick Print sends the document to the printer straight away, Print Preview offers a method of previewing the document prior to sending it to the printer and is often a useful precaution. To access Print Preview, click on the Office button in the top left of your screen, choose Print and then Print Preview.
If the preview of your document is acceptable, simply click on the print button to send the document of the printer. If the document needs to be changed in some way, one option is to click on Page Setup. This gives you access to settings such as the margins, page orientation, header and footer, as well as other advanced features.
You also have the option of zooming in on your spreadsheet data by clicking on the zoom button. When you click on the zoom button a second time, the whole page is displayed again. Excel also allows you to preview all of your pages by clicking on the Next and Previous buttons.
Then there are the margins. These consist of dotted lines with drag handles at the end of each line. The margins displayed in Print Preview are pretty comprehensive. To begin with, we have the page margins: top, bottom, left and right. Then we have margins to control the area available to headers and footers. As well as this, we have drag handles allowing us to change the column widths. You will often find that you can reduce the number of pages needed to print your document simply by changing the various margins.
The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with TrainingCompany.Com, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007Classes in London and throughout the UK.