Print Area

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Print Area' topic. Click the article's title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

Adding the Set Print Area Tool
Need to set print areas quite often? Adding a tool that allows you to quickly make the specification can be a great time saver.

Centering Your Worksheet
When it comes time to print out your worksheet, it helps to position the worksheet on the printed page in an appealing manner. One way to do that is to center the information either horizontally or vertically on the page. This tip shows how easy it is to do this type of formatting.

Clearing the Print Area
If you want to print only a given portion of a worksheet, Excel allows you to set up a print area. This is a named range that is used by the printing routines in Excel to limit what is printed. This tip explains how to get rid of any print areas you may have previously created.

Locking the Print Area
Excel allows you to specify an area of your worksheet that should be printed. Here's how to "lock" that area so it cannot be changed.

Multiple Print Areas on a Single Printed Page
You can select non-contiguous ranges of cells and set them as the print area for a worksheet. Getting those ranges on a single sheet of printout, however, is a different story; Excel wants to put each range on its own page. This tip explains some of the ways you can work around this behavior of Excel.

Printing a Chart Across Multiple Pages
Wouldn't it be great to have your huge charts print out on multiple pieces of paper that you could then piece together? While Excel doesn't provide this capability directly, this tip looks at some ways that you can get the multi-page printout you want.

Printing a Single Column in Multiple Columns
The data in some worksheets consists of just a column or two of data, extending for many rows. When you print these worksheets, you end up with a printout that has a lot of white space on the right side of the page. You could use less paper if you were able to "snake" your column on the page so that it occupied multiple columns. This tip shows you how.

Printing Columns and Rows
When you print something from Excel, you normally print an entire worksheet, a page, or a selected range of cells. If you want to print a row and a column (and nothing else), then you will need to prepare the worksheet for printing first.

Printing Just the Visible Data
In a large worksheet, you may want to display and print just a portion of the available data. Displaying the desired information is easy; printing it is a bit trickier. This tip discusses how you can approach the problem of printing only what you've displayed on the screen.

Printing Multiple Selections
Need to print several portions of a worksheet all on a single piece of paper? Here's an easy way you can get what you need using just cut and paste.

Printing Multiple Worksheet Ranges
Need to print more than one portion of your worksheet? If you use named ranges for the different ranges you want to print, you can apply the technique in tip to print whatever named ranges you want.

Setting Header/Footer Margins
The default margins for your headers and footers is .75 inches, left and right. Unfortunately there is no way to change this margin; it is hard-coded into the program.

Setting the Print Area
Many people, when they print a worksheet, print the entire thing. You don't have to, however. You can specify that Excel print only a portion of a worksheet by designating a print area, as described in this tip.