How To Use Print Preview And Quick Print In Microsoft Excel

Excel’s Quick Print facility allows you to send a document to the default printer without the need of entering values in a dialogue box. If the Quick Print button is not already displayed on your Quick Access Toolbar, simply choose it from the Customise Quick Access Toolbar drop-down menu. You will notice that the tooltip which appears when you position the mouse over the Quick Print button has the name of the default printer in brackets. If the printer that is displayed is not the one you anticipated you can simply use the regular Print command instead.

If, like a growing number of Microsoft Excel users, most of your documents are transmitted electronically, you may have Adobe PDF set up as the default printer. In this case, when you click the Quick Print button, you will be prompted to save the file since printing to Adobe PDF means creating a disc file.

Whatever your default printer, you will find that Excel prints the document using its default settings: moderate margins, no header or footer, no column or row headings and no gridlines. If the document cannot fit on a single page, Excel will produce multiple pages moving down first and then across. Having printed the document, Excel paginates your worksheet and subsequently displays dotted lines representing the page boundaries.

Whereas Quick Print will send a document to the printer straight away, Print Preview offers a method of previewing documents prior to sending it to the printer and is often a useful precaution. To access the Print Preview feature, click on the Office button in the top left of your screen, choose Print and then Print Preview.

If the preview of the document looks OK to you, simply click on the print button to send the document of the printer. If the document needs to be modified before it can be printed correctly, one option is to click on Page Setup. This gives you access to settings such as orientation, margins, header and footer, as well as several other advanced features.

You also have the option of zooming in on your spreadsheet data by clicking on the zoom button. When you click on the zoom button a second time, the whole page is displayed again. Excel also allows you to preview all of your pages by clicking on the Next and Previous buttons.

You can also make margins visible or hidden. Margins consist of dotted lines with dragable handles at the end of each line. The margins displayed in Print Preview are pretty comprehensive. Firstly, there are the page margins: top, bottom, left and right. Next, there are margins to control the area available to headers and footers. Finally, there are dragable handles allowing us to change the column widths. You will often find that you can reduce the number of pages needed to print a document simply by altering the various margins.

The author is a trainer and developer with TrainingCompany.Com, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007training courses in London and throughout the UK.