Excel Printing Tips with Financial Planning Software.

First, try resizing rows and columns. You can either drag the row or column borders, or right click on the row numbers or column letters, and then choose height or width. Or using the same menu, you can also hide or unhide rows or columns, or insert new rows or columns. Usually all it takes is resizing (and then looking things over using Print Preview) to get what you want.

Once you get things to print the way you want to, save the file as the original template, so the next time you use it, you won't have to go through it again.

If you click on a graph / chart you then selected just that chart. You can then print it on one page.

Also, with Excel, if there's anything in a place outside the print area you want, then it will print a bunch of blank pages in order to print everything. So it's best to do a Print Preview first. Then count how many, or which pages, you actually want to print.

Then you can only print the page(s) that you want to by doing this: Click File, Print... then in the Print Range section in the middle, click From: then scroll until 1 appears, then click the field To: then scroll until the last number of pages appears. Then click OK.

First, do a Print Preview so you can see the dashed gridlines. Go to File, Print Preview. When it's up, click Close. Now the area is shown in dotted lines on the spreadsheet that will automatically print when you click Print (and not Print... which will bring up another menu, which is needed later).

More than likely, this will not be the area you want to print. If you're using the actual program, and it's only off a little bit, then you can tinker with row and column sizes to make it right. If not, then you'll have to set and print via ranges manually.

How to do this in Excel 2007 and 2010 is below

How To Manually Set and Print Ranges in pre-Excel 2007

Printing a range in Excel is just telling Excel only to print an exact area. This area is called a print range (or print selection, or print just the selected area or just a range).

Words in bold italic font are actual menu selections in pre-Excel 2007:

1) Highlight the area you want to print.

For example, put your cursor in the middle of cell A1, then drag it down and to the right until the area you want to print is only in the black or blue box (highlighted area).

If you don't want the top left corner to be cell A1, then click where you want the top left corner to be. Once you've highlighted a range that you want to print, proceed to step 2.

2) Menus: File, Print Area, Set Print Area

3) Menus: File, Page Setup

On the far left Page tab, in the middle there is a section called Scaling.

Change Scaling from "Adjust to:" to "Fit to:" then click OK.

4) Menus: File, Print... (not Print, you want the one with the three dots after it).

The bottom left section is the Print What section.

Check Selection. Click OK.

5) Menus: File, Print Preview to see what's going on first.

If it looks like it will print only the area you want, then you did it correctly.

At this point, make a note of what page you actually want to print, to prevent it running amok and printing tons of blank pages or wasting paper.

6) Print (or Print... then select only the pages you want to print, then click OK).

How To Manually Set and Print Ranges in Excel 2007 & 2010

Words in bold italic font are actual menu selections in Excel 2007:

1) Highlight the area you want to print.

For example, put your cursor in the middle of cell A1, then drag it down and to the right until the area you want to print is only in the black or blue box (highlighted area).

If you don't want the top left corner to be cell A1, then click where you want the top left corner to be. Once you've highlighted a range that you want to print, proceed to step 2.

2) Ribbon menu: Page Layout, Print Area, Set Print Area

Do a print preview to check it first before proceeding.

3) Ribbon menu: Page Layout, Click the tiny little arrow at the bottom right under, Print Titles

The Page Setup menu comes up.

4) On the far left Page tab, in the middle there is a section called Scaling.

Change Scaling from "Adjust to:" to "Fit to:" then click OK.

5) Click Print while still in the Page Setup dialog box.

6) The printing dialog box comes up.

The bottom left section is the Print What section.

Check Selection.

Click OK.

It should then print just the range you highlighted.

If it wants to be annoying and print multiple pages (after you just told it to print just one range on one page), then go to Page Layout, Margins, Custom Margins, Page, then click the Fit To button, then set both fields to be 1.

How to send financial plans to clients via e-mail, without sending the whole program is explained on the Excel help page.

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