
Tips.Net > ExcelTips Home > Printing > Watermarks > Watermarks in Excel
Summary: Excel allows you to add backgrounds to your worksheets, but this isn’t the same as a watermark. There is no way to create a real watermark in Excel, but this tip presents a couple of alternative ways you can simulate them on printouts. (This tip works with Microsoft Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, and Excel 2003.)
Excel does not have the ability to easily create and print watermarks. Granted, you can use the Background feature of Excel to add a graphic that appears "behind" your worksheet, but that graphic does not appear in Print Preview, will not print on the printer, and doesn't transfer to any Web page you make create from the spreadsheet. (See the Microsoft Knowledge Base, article 213977.)
This is amazing, particularly since people often use Excel to create and maintain confidential information and including a watermark that indicates confidentiality would be helpful. So how do you create a watermark to show that information is a draft or it is confidential? There are a couple of ways you can work around this deficiency.
First of all, some printers have the ability to produce watermarks and place them on your output. Check out your printer's documentation to see if your printer can do this. If it can, this is definitely the easiest solution.
You can create a watermark using WordArt and then manually place it on each output page, as desired. When creating the WordArt, format the colors to SemiTransparent and use a light gray fill for the art. This approach takes quite a bit of trial-and-error to get exactly what you want, and you must place the graphic on each page of your output. (How you use WordArt is beyond the scope of ExcelTips, but has been covered extensively in past issues of WordTips, and there is online help available--in Word--for this handy tool.)
Another workaround is that you can simply perform two printing passes. Create your watermark in Word and then print it on the page. Then run the paper through the printer again, this time printing from Excel. This may sound convoluted, but it is no more of a bother than any of the other workarounds. It also has the added benefit of a smaller Excel file since you aren't saving graphics with the file.
Tip #2202 applies to Microsoft Excel versions: 97 2000 2002 2003
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