About printing

You can set the orientation of the printed worksheet to portrait or landscape.

When to use landscape     Switch to landscape when you need to print many more columns of data than will fit on a portrait page. If you don't want to use landscape, you can change the layout of the printed worksheet to fit the data to the available space, or adjust the margins.

Making the data fit the page     You can make the printed image fit the page or paper size by shrinking or expanding the image. Other changes you can make to the layout of the printed worksheet include setting the paper size, centering the data on the printed page, and controlling how the pages are numbered. These changes affect only the worksheet's printed appearance, not how it looks on the screen.

Print partial data     To print only selected parts of the data on a worksheet, you can specify which areas to print.

To put page numbers or other text above or below the worksheet data on each page, you can add headers or footers (header and footer: A header, which can consist of text or graphics, appears at the top of every page in a section. A footer appears at the bottom of every page. Headers and footers often contain page numbers, chapter titles, dates, and author names.) to your printed worksheet. Headers print at the top of every page; footers print at the bottom of every page. You can use built-in headers or footers or create your own.

Headers and footers are separate from the data on your worksheet and appear only when you preview and print. In addition to headers and footers, you can repeat worksheet data as print titles (print titles: Row or column labels that are printed at the top of or on the left side of every page on a printed worksheet.) on every page.

To see each page exactly as it will print, click Print Preview . In print preview, you can see headers, footers, and print titles (print titles: Row or column labels that are printed at the top of or on the left side of every page on a printed worksheet.).

When to adjust margins     Adjust the margins or columns when your data is too wide to fit across the page and you don't want to shrink it to fit. In print preview, you can change the width of the margins and columns on the worksheet by dragging the sizing handles. Click the Margins button to display the handles.

Change the size of individual columns and rows Move the gridlines in the row numbers and column letters areas.

Gridlines, page order, and other settings     In print preview, you can change the way your worksheet prints. With the Setup button, you can turn gridlines on or off, print a draft copy of your worksheet, and change the order in which pages are printed.

Page break preview shows where page breaks (page break: Divider that breaks a worksheet into separate pages for printing. Excel inserts automatic page breaks based on the paper size, margin settings, scaling options, and the positions of any manual page breaks that you insert.) occur on the worksheet and which area of the worksheet will be printed. Page breaks you set are solid blue lines, and automatic page breaks set by Excel are dashed blue lines.

When to move page breaks     To fit more rows or columns on the current page, move a horizontal or vertical page break. In Page break preview, this automatically shrinks the data to fit on the page. You may want to preview the page again to make sure the font size isn't too small.

Forcing page breaks     To end a page at a particular point and start a new page, you can set a new page break.

Repeat row and column labels     If the data on your worksheet has column or row labels (also called print titles), you can have Excel repeat these labels on every page of the printed worksheet.

The labels don't have to be in the first rows or columns of the worksheet, but they don't begin repeating until after the row or column they originally appeared in has been printed.

Repeat row and column headings     You can also print the row numbers or column letters for a worksheet (don't confuse these headings with the labels in your data).

You can use any combination of headers and footers, repeating labels, and row and column headings.