Last week we talked about using Print Preview to conserve paper. This week, we’ll talk about a huge paper-waster…Microsoft Excel. I wonder how many trees have given their noble lives for the 2,000 attempts to get a spreadsheet all on one page.
There’s no need for the print-and-see approach, however, because Microsoft Excel has a very cool feature called ‘Print Area.’ To use this feature, simply select all of your data, then select File>Print Area>Set Print Area.
With that set, then choose Page Setup from the File Menu. At this point, you want to set the page Scaling to fit your data either on one page (1 page wide by 1 page tall) or if you know you’ll have too much data to fit 1 page tall, you could leave that box blank and Excel will confine your print to 1 page wide, but use as many pages as necessary to accommodate your data.
The key to remember when using this feature is that Excel will shrink your data in order to fill your request. This is where allowing multiple pages would be used since forcing it to fit onto only 1 page may cause the text to appear too small to read.
[Versions and Platforms could make this sequence slightly different. If you have trouble finding this feature, simply enter ‘MS Excel’ with your version number along with ‘Print Area’ into your favorite search engine for specific instructions.]
Have fun trying out this new feature. And remember, more trees = cleaner air.
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“Tech Tuesday” is published every Tuesday. To reach Tracy with comments or questions, email her here.
