Scaling Down an Excel Spreadsheet for Printing

You can save a lot of paper, time, and frustration by using the scaling feature when you’re printing an Excel spreadsheet. Rather than simply hitting the print button and watching the printer crank out a 25-page “mural”, you can adjust the scale of what you’re printing so that it fits on far fewer pages.

To do this, first select the range of cells that you want to print. Then go to File/Print Area/Set Print Area. This tells Excel the specific cells that you want to print. Now go to File/Page Setup and look at the Page tab. Here you’ll find 3 ways of printing more efficiently:

1. First decide if you want to print in Portrait or Landscape mode. If your spreadsheet won’t quite fit into the 8 ½” width of a printout, switching to landscape will give you an extra 2 ½” of width.
2. You can specify the exact number of pages the spreadsheet will print out onto by selecting the radio button next to Fit to:. Now, you can choose the exact dimensions of your printout. If you want the spreadsheet to all fit on one page, then you would choose “1 page(s) wide by 1 tall”. Otherwise, you can let it run across several pages whichever way you like…1 by 2, 4 by 1, etc. Click OK when you’ve selected the appropriate size.
3. Instead of Fit to:, you can select Adjust to: and give a zoom percentage like you would with a Xerox copy machine.
4. Click on the Margins tab. The margins by default are usually pretty wide. You can gain a lot of real estate by bringing all four of these in.

If you used Fit to: to specify exact dimensions, you can go back and see what zoom percentage the computer needs to shrink your spreadsheet to make it fit within your given dimensions. Once again go to File/Page Setup. Now, on the Page tab, you’ll see the estimated percentage next to the option Adjust to:. Don’t select this option; it’s just for your information.

If the percentage is less than 50%, your printout may be unreadable without a magnifying glass! Consider other ways of trimming down your spreadsheet.

Finally, make sure you preview your printout before you send it to the printer. Go to File/Print Preview and you can see exactly how it looks. Getting it right before you print not only saves a tree, but it saves money as well!