Fitting Your Printout on a Page

I can't tell you how many times I have gone to print a worksheet, only to have the very last column or the very last row spill over onto another page. This not only wastes paper, but it is very frustrating.

To get around this, Excel has a handy scaling feature that allows you to specify how many pages you want your printed output to occupy. You set the page dimensions, and Excel shrinks everything down so it fits in the specified area. To take advantage of this feature, follow these steps:

1. Set up your worksheet as desired.
2. Choose Page Setup from the File menu. Excel displays the Page Setup dialog box. (To display the Page Setup dialog box in Excel 2007, display the Page Layout tab of the ribbon, and then click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Page Setup group.)
3. Make sure the Page tab is selected. (Click here to see a related figure.)
4. Select the Fit To option and use the associated controls to specify how many pages you want the output to occupy.
5. Click on OK.
6. Print your worksheet as normal.

One of the tricks I often use is to set the Fit To controls 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.