Page Setup in Excel (Table of Contents)
Introduction to Page Setup in Excel
Often you may come up with a situation where you need to print the excel sheet which you have with yourself, containing some important data that needed to be shared as a hard copy. In such cases, you will be strongly in need of page setup. It becomes easy for you to print the pages once you are well aware of how you can do the same under Microsoft Excel. There are several operations involved under page setup like:
- Setting margins for top, bottom, left and right.
- Adding header or footer to the excel sheet you are going to print.
- Page views: Portrait, landscape or custom.
- Setting printing area etc.
We will go through all the page setup settings and options one by one in this article. It is really very easy under excel to setup the page before printing and previews it to make some amendments as per your need/requirement.
How to Setup Page in Excel?
Page Setup in Excel is very simple and easy. Let’s understand in detail how to setup page in excel.
#1 – Page Setup Using Excel View Tab
Suppose we have data as shown below:
We will see how a basic page setup can be done using Excel’s View tab, present under the top ribbon.
Click on View tab under Excel ribbon which is placed at the top of your sheet. You’ll see multiple operations under two options: “Workbook Views” and “Show”. Under Workbook views, you have different view types: Normal view, Page Break Preview, Page Layout, Custom Views.
Click on “Page Break Preview”. It will break your page according to the printing area as shown below.
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Click on Page Layout option and it will show you the excel sheet in a page layout. It already has Header option by default (I will add ‘Person wise Sales Data’ as a title). Under Show option, you can check or uncheck different options like Ruler, Gridlines, etc.
#2 – Setting up Margins in Excel
We often come up with a situation where the columns from your printing page are occupying the entire page and still have one column, not fitting into the page and it goes to the next printing page for that document. In order to tackle this issue, we can use the margins button/options present under the Page Layout tab in Excel.
Click on the Page Layout tab in excel. You will see a range of operations available each of them consisting of several options.
Under “Page Layout”, click on the “Margins” button, you will see different margin options. There are ideally 4 of them: Last Custom Settings, Normal, Wide and Narrow margins. You can select anyone as per your requirement.
Click on “Narrow” margins, it will narrow down margins and will have more space to acquire the columns.
#3 – Page Orientation under Page Layout
Sometimes, adjusting margin only will not include all your data columns on one page, in that case, you may need to change the page orientation.
Go to “Page Layout” tab and select the Orientation button situated beside the Margins button.
As soon as you click on the Orientation button, you will see two options: Portrait and Landscape.
By default, the orientation is in Portrait form. Change it to Landscape so that all your columns can be visible in one single printing page.
#4 – Adjusting the Size of Printing Page under Page Layout
You can also change the size of the page in order to get a proper printing page. Go to “Page Layout” tab and click on “Size” button under it. This option allows you to set the paper size for your document when it gets printed.
A series of different paper options will appear there. Like Letter, Legal, A4, A3, etc. by default, it will be set to “Letter” page size (As we have changed the orientation to Landscape).
Click on”A4″ to set the page size as A4 (this is the most widely used paper size while printing any document).
#5 – Print Titles Under Page Layout
If your data is long which means it has a large number of rows (say 10,000) it will not fit on one page anyway. It will go on multiple pages. However, the main concern with this is, the column titles are only visible on the first page. What about the next pages where data is populated. It becomes hectic to decide which column is for what. Therefore, having column titles on each page is something which is mandatory while setting page.
Click on “Page Layout” tab and go to “Print Titles” button. Click on that button.
As soon as you click on “Print Titles” button, a new “Page Setup” window will pop up under which “Sheet” option is active (As you have clicked on Print Titles).
Under it, click on “Rows to repeat at the top option”. This option allows you to add the rows with a title on each page. Once you click on it, you will be in nee q d to select the row ranges which you want to print at the top of every printing page. In our case, it is $A$1:$D$1. Here, in this Sheet option, we also can set the printing area, columns that we want to repeat at the top, etc. Click on OK once done with the amendments.
This is how we setup page before printing in Excel. Let’s wrap the things up with some things to remember.
Things to Remember About Page Setup in Excel
- You can also add custom margins under Page Layout in Excel.
- Print titles and report header, both are different. Print Title prints the title of each column on multiple pages whereas the report header is the header of the report/main title of the report.
- If you want to remove the print titles, go to Page Setup under Print Titles section, select the Sheet tab, and remove the rows provided under Print Titles section.
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