There are occasions when it may be strategic to print a block of your spreadsheet project without printing the entire project. This need could be a temporary need or a permanent part of your overall plan. Excel lets you identify a block of the spreadsheet and print just that part if you so desire.
Pretend for a minute that the large red rectangle represents your entire spreadsheet project. The blue area inside represents a portion of the large project you wish to print. Excel let's to have a "printing area" inside your project if you need it.
The printing margins, orientation, etc. for printing will be applied to the cells in the Print Area just as you would expect. Adjustments in the print setup will be applied to the content you actually print.
The first thing to do is to indentify what block of cells you wish to print. You select this block by clicking and dragging. The cells will be highlighted to indicate they are selected.
For purposes of this discussion, we will get Excel to print this area of our project.
The actual process to a real print area would be the same.
Once
you have correctly selected all of the cells you wish to print, you would
click on File and drag your mouse down to Print
Area. You follow the right-arrow to select Set Print Area.
The block of cells you initially selected will be blocked off by Excel. The next time you attempt to print, this block will be the content of the printed document. This means make your initial selection carefully.
We can look at what would be printed using the Print Preview of Excel.
From this preview, you can tell the gridlines have not been turned on.
Also you can easily see that the text alignment of the cells in the Print Area is preserved.
A "neater" printout will require some cell alignment adjustments.
There has to be a way to correct your mistake of selecting the wrong initial block of cells or to remove the Print Area if you have finished printing and wish to print another area or the entire document.
Simply click on File + Print Area and follow the right-arrow to Clear Print Area. That's all there is to printing portions (blocks of cells) of your project!
Return | See a Movie of the Process