How to Print Excel Spreadsheet: 9 Tips for Perfect Prints

In this guide, you’ll learn how to print Excel Spreadsheet to get a perfect printout, such as making Excel fit to page (print paper), printing 1 side or 2 sides, etc.

I use example data like the following image:

You can see, that this example uses a table that has 10 columns (A to J) and 219 rows. With this data, you’ll find many problems that cause imperfect printouts.

Stay calm!

I’ll give you a trick on how to print Excel Spreadsheet and get perfect printouts.

Before continuing to study this tutorial, for your practice please download the following excel file:

How to Print Excel Spreadsheet?

Important! To print quickly, you can use the Excel shortcut by pressing the Ctrl + P keyboard keys simultaneously. Then you can adjust the print settings before printing the Excel Spreadsheet to get perfect results.

Additionally, you can also print an Excel Spreadsheet by following these steps:

1. Click any cell in the Excel Worksheet that you want to print.
2. On the Ribbon, click the File Tab.
3. Click Print to print your document. Results:

In these steps, you have just opened the Print Settings Window in Excel. Pay attention to the part that I marked blue.

This section is a preview of the print results if you print the sheet directly. Unfortunately, there is a part of the data table that is cut off in the preview.

This indicates that all the data on the Worksheet doesn’t fit on one printed page.

So that the Excel printout fits on one page, as desired, you need to change the print settings. Here I explain the Excel Print settings one by one:

#1 Select Printer and Change the Number of Printed Copies

In this section, please focus on the Print Button, Form Copies, and Select Printer as shown in the following image:

1. Print button: Useful for ordering Excel to immediately print according to the Print Settings that you have specified.
2. Form Copies: Useful for determining the number of printed copies or what is usually called duplicates. So if you choose 2, then each page will be printed 2 times.
3. Select Printer: Useful for selecting the printer to use. Make sure the printer is active and connected to your computer. If it’s correct, it will say Online (not Offline).

Before clicking the Print button, please change the Print Settings first to get perfect printouts. Understand the following explanation:

#2 Choose What You Want to Print (Cell/Range)

At the beginning of this guide, I explained the standard Excel print method in 3 stages. This method will only print all cells containing data (including table titles/cells in black) in the range A1:J129.

By selecting a section to print, you will instruct Excel to print only that particular section and exclude others.

For example, if you want to print only the table and exclude black cells, follow these steps:

1. Select any cell in the Excel Worksheet—for example, cell A204.
2. Click the File Tab.
3. Click Print. Then look at the following image:

Please click Selected Print, 4 options will be available. These four options will print your Excel Spreadsheet in different ways, as follows:

Selected Print	Will Print
Print Active Sheets	To print the currently active worksheet – the currently opened sheet.
Print Entire Workbook	To print all non-blank sheets in your Excel file.
Print Selection	To print only selected cells. I will explain below.
Print Selected Table	To print selected tables only.

In the previous step, I selected cell A204. Selecting Print Selection will only print cell A204 as shown in the following image:

If you select the range A1:F25, then Excel will print only that range and ignore the other cells.

Meanwhile, for Print Selected Table, because I selected cell A204 which is one of the cells in the format table, Excel will only print the table and ignore the other cells as shown in the following image:

Important! The Print Selected Table option will only appear if you use Table Format, not tables that only use Borders or Named Ranges.

Do you understand this part and can decide which part you want to print? If so, let’s move on to the next section!

#3 Select the Page to Print

In Excel, 1 sheet will be divided into several pages. If you only want to print certain pages, please change the Workbook view in the following way:

1. Open your Worksheet.
2. Click the View Tab.
3. Click Page Break Preview. Results:

Excel creates a divider between pages (using blue lines) in the Worksheet view.

Since I chose Print Selected Table in Stage 2, the Page Break Preview display looks like the image above.

By the way, if I select Print Active Sheets or something else, the Page Break Preview will look like the following image:

It can be seen that the table doesn’t fit on 1 page, namely Page 1 for the left side and Page 6 for the right side. Currently, this method is only for finding pages in your Worksheet.

To print only certain pages, please fill in Form Pages as the first page and Form To as the last page in the Print Settings Window.

If not, please just leave it blank as shown in the following image:

#4 Print 1 Side or 2 Sides?

In a paper there are 2 sides. Call it the front and back sides. Well, by default, Excel will only print on 1 side. So 1 page will be printed on 1 sheet of paper.

Note: Printing on both sides of the paper is also called Duplex Printing.

Currently, there are 3 print page options, namely

Print One Sided (Only Print on One Side of the Pages), that is, Excel will only print 1 page for 1 sheet of paper.

Print on Both Sides (Flip Page on Long Edge), namely Excel will print 2 pages for 1 sheet of paper in the following way:

Let’s say the worksheet you want to print has 12 pages. First of all, Excel will print 1 page for each sheet of paper up to page 6.

Then, behind the sixth page, Excel will print page 7. And behind page 5, Excel will print page 8. So on, page 12 will be printed behind page 1.

If this is what you choose, then when the 6th page is finished printing, you have to flip all the paper to print the next page (Some printers have an automatic duplex print feature without manually flipping the paper).

Print Both Sides (Flip Page on Short Edge). Just like the second type, this option will instruct Excel to print 2 pages on 1 paper (duplex printing).

The difference is that Flip Page on Short Edge will print pages 1 and 2 on 1 sheet of paper (duplex). And so on with pages 3 and 4.

So, Excel will print the odd page first (1, 3, 5, etc.). Then you flip the printed paper to print even pages (2, 4, 6, etc.).

If you need to print 2 pages on 1 paper in Excel, please select Print Both Sides (adjust to your needs). If not, please select Print One Sided only.

#5 Specify Print Order

This Print Order is useful for determining how Excel prints copies. In the Select Printer and Copy section, I have explained how to print 2, 3, 4 copies, etc.

If you don’t want to print more than 1 copy, please just ignore this section. If you want to print more than 1 copy, please pay attention to the following 2 options:

1. Collated, useful for printing pages sequentially (1, 2, 3, 4 etc.). If you have reached the last page, Excel will repeat the print from page 1 to the last.
2. Uncollated, useful for printing a copy of the page first. For example, if you want to make 3 copies, Excel will print 3 copies of page 1. Then print 3 copies of page 2. And so on until the last page.

#6 Select Page Orientation

This page orientation determines how the page will be printed. There are 2 options as shown in the following image:

1. Portrait Orientation, namely vertical print results.
2. Landscape Orientation, namely horizontal print results.

If the print results do not fit on 1 page, you can choose Landscape Orientation to get more space.

However, if you want the print to fit in a vertical orientation without being cropped, please select Portrait Orientation. We will adjust the size to fit on 1 page.

#7 Select Paper Size

The most commonly used paper size is Letter (8.5 inches × 11 inches). The actual data in your Spreadsheet may require a larger size.

So, you can adjust the print results so that they fit and are not cut off by changing to a larger paper size.

Tabloid has a larger size – 11″x17″. You can also select More Paper Size to determine other paper sizes.

However, if this isn’t possible and you want to use small-sized paper such as Letter, A4, or smaller, I still have 1 simple trick: setting the margins.

#8 Set Margins

The margin in the Excel print menu is the distance between the edge of the paper and the body of the data printed on 1 sheet of paper.

By default, Excel has and uses Normal Margins. However, you can change it to custom to get more space in the following ways:

1. In the Excel Print Settings Window, click the Show Margin icon
2. A margin point will appear which you can set as you wish.
3. Click, hold, and drag the margin line to the edge of the paper. Please adjust it to your needs. Results:

If it isn’t possible to use this method, I suggest you use Normal Margin. Then follow these final tips to get perfect print results.

#9 Make An Excel Spreadsheet Fit to Print with Scaling

If you ask, How do I make an Excel Spreadsheet fit for printing without changing the paper size and margins? You need to change the scaling.

Scaling can change the size of the data to be printed, whether without changing the scale (100% zoom), or whether it must fit the width or height of the paper.

In other words, Scaling will change the data zoom to be larger or smaller so that it fits on 1 page.

By default, Excel doesn’t use Scaling (No Scaling) so the data is printed with a zoom size of 100%.

This can cause the data you want to print to be cropped or not fit on 1 page as seen in the following image:

If you select Fit Sheet on One Page, then Excel will resize all the data to be printed (rows and columns) into 1 page as shown in the following image:

In this example, we have a large amount of data (216 rows with 10 columns). So it isn’t surprising that the data becomes very small like the image.

If you select Fit All Columns on One Page, then Excel only adjusts the column size so that it fits in print on 1 page as shown in the following image:

Previously, if you chose No Scaling, 1 page only printed 6 columns.

Meanwhile, by selecting Fit All Columns on One Page, Excel will adjust the size of all columns (there are 10 columns) to fit the width of the paper.

Meanwhile, the rows still use the original size. So in this example, the width of all tables isn’t cropped, and then the second page continues to the next row of data.

Finally, if you select Fit All Rows on One Page, then Excel will print all rows on 1 sheet of paper as shown in the following image:

Note: So that the print results fit on 1 page, you must choose the right scale. Please adjust the scale to suit your data conditions. Choose the right scaling to get perfect printouts.

So, what do you think about the guide on how to print Excel Spreadsheet above? I hope the 9 tips for getting perfect printouts above can solve your problem.

Next, you can learn other Excel tutorials through the following Guideline Shortcuts: