Printing Workbooks Excel 2013

Introduction

Video: Printing Workbooks

There may be times when you want to print a workbook to view and share your data offline. Once you've chosen your page layout settings, it's easy to preview and print a workbook from Excel using the Print pane.

Review our Page Layout lesson to learn more about preparing your workbook for printing.

Optional: Download our practice workbook.

To access the Print pane:

Select the File tab. Backstage view will appear.
Select Print. The Print pane will appear.

Click the buttons in the interactive below to learn more about using the Print pane.

To print a workbook:

Navigate to the Print pane, then select the desired printer.
Enter the number of copies you wish to print.
Select any additional settings if needed (see above interactive).
Click Print.
Choosing a print area
Before you print an Excel workbook, it's important to decide exactly what information you want to print. For example, if you have multiple worksheets in your workbook, you will need to decide if you want to print the entire workbook or only active worksheets. There may also be times when you want to print only a selection of content from your workbook.

To print active sheets:
Worksheets are considered active when selected.
1. Select the worksheet you want to print. To print multiple worksheets, click the first worksheet, hold the Ctrl key on your keyboard, then click any other worksheets you want to select.
2. Navigate to the Print pane.
3. Select Print Active Sheets from the Print Range drop-down menu.
4. Click the Print button.
To print the entire workbook:
1. Navigate to the Print pane.
2. Select Print Entire Workbook from the Print Range drop-down menu.
3. Click the Print button.
To print a selection:
In our example, we'll print a selection of content related to upcoming softball games in July.
1. Select the cells you want to print.
2. Navigate to the Print pane.
3. Select Print Selection from the Print Range drop-down menu.
4. A preview of your selection will appear in the Preview pane.
5. Click the Print button to print the selection.
If you prefer, you can also set the print area in advance so you'll be able to visualize which cells will be printed as you work in Excel. Simply select the cells you want to print, click the Page Layout tab, select the Print Area command, then choose Set Print Area.
Fitting and scaling content
On occasion, you may need to make small adjustments from the Print pane to fit your workbook content neatly onto a printed page. The Print pane includes several tools to help fit and scale your content, such as scaling and page margins.

To fit content before printing:
If some of your content is being cut off by the printer, you can use scaling to fit your workbook to the page automatically.
1. Navigate to the Print pane. In our example, we can see in the Preview pane that our content will be cut off when printed.
2. Select the desired option from the Scaling drop-down menu. In our example, we'll select Fit Sheet on One Page.
3. The worksheet will be condensed to fit onto a single page.
4. When you're satisfied with the scaling, click Print.
Keep in mind that worksheets will become more difficult to read as they are scaled down, so you may not want to use this option when printing a worksheet with a lot of information.

To modify margins in the Preview pane:
Sometimes you may only need to adjust a single margin to make your data fit more comfortably. You can modify individual page margins from the Preview pane.
1. Navigate to the Print pane, then click the Show Margins button in the lower-right corner.
2. The page margins will appear in the Preview pane. Hover the mouse over one of the margin markers until the cursor becomes a double arrow . In our example, we'll modify the left margin to fit an additional column on the page.
3. Click, hold, and drag the mouse to increase or decrease the margin width.
4. Release the mouse. The margin will be modified. In our example, we were able to fit an additional column on the page.