Although Excel’s Print Preview facility is very handy, it is purely a preview mode. You can’t work on your data while in Print Preview mode. In addition to Print Preview, Excel 2007 offers two new modes of working which offer similar benefits to Print Preview while allowing you full access to your data. To access these modes, click on one of the buttons on the right of the Excel status bar. Here you will find buttons that can take you from Normal mode to Page Layout or to Page Break Preview.
Normal mode is the default mode in Excel. Here, the focus is on modifying and entering your data without thinking too much about pagination. If you print or preview your data, Excel paginates the worksheet and inserts dotted lines to show you the page breaks. This is normally the only feedback which relates to the printed version of your document.
In contrast to Normal view, Page Layout view gives you a permanent preview of where page breaks will occur and which data will be printed on which pages. When you are in Page Layout view, try zooming out so that you can see more of the worksheet and you’ll notice that Excel displays margins on the left, right, top and bottom, as well as headers and footers. However, the cool thing is that Page Layout view not simply a preview mode. You still have access to all the data within your worksheet and you can edit all the data and formulas in your cells. If the printed version of your worksheet is to be the important one, you may find it convenient to stay in this mode permanently; particularly if you have the benefit of a large monitor.
Excel’s third mode is called Page Break Preview. When you click on the Page Break Preview button that Excel conveniently zooms out so that you can see more of your worksheet. Page Break Preview mode is not dissimilar to Normal mode. Like Normal mode, it is not WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) and neither headers and footers nor margins are shown. However, the key difference between Normal mode and Page Break Preview mode is that, when you’re working in Page Break Preview mode, the page break margins can be dragged.
This is a very useful facility: if you want to force a given column of data onto a new page, you just drag the blue dotted line representing the page break to the left of that column. It’s a deceptively simple facility. In fact, some experienced Excel 2003 users may even mistake the dotted lines representing page breaks for those which are displayed in Normal mode and may not even realise that they can in fact be dragged.
The The writer of this article is a trainer and developer with TrainingCompany.Com, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007training courses at their central London training centre.