Scaling Your Printing

Worksheets can get very big, very fast. Often you want to still print an entire worksheet in a single sheet of paper. Excel makes this easy to do by using scaling. All you need to do is follow these steps if you are using a version of Word prior to Word 2007:

1. Set up your worksheet as desired.
2. Choose Page Setup from the File menu. Excel displays the Page Setup dialog box.
3. Make sure the Page tab is selected. (Click here to see a related figure.) It is the left-most tab and should be displayed by default unless you've recently viewed a different tab in the Page Setup dialog box.
4. In the scaling area, specify how you want your output scaled. Excel allows you to set scaling at any value between 10 percent and 400 percent of normal size. (The results of scaling to a certain percentage will depend on the quality and capabilities of your printer.)
5. As an alternative, use Fit To to specify how many pages you want the output to occupy.
6. Click on OK.
7. Print your worksheet as normal.

While the above steps will work in Excel 2007, the ribbon tools actually make it easier to set the scaling. Display the Page Layout tab of the ribbon, and make your scaling adjustments using the settings in the Scale to Fit group.

One of the tricks I often use is to set the Fit To settings to 1 page wide by 99 pages tall. In this way, I am sure the output will fit on one page across. Since my output isn't over 99 pages in length, no shrinking is done on this dimension. I end up with output that is 1 page wide by how ever many pages long Excel needs to print.