Printing Your Workbook
After setting the page setup and previewing your data, it is time to print. You can print selected data, selected sheets, or the entire workbook.
To print your workbook, follow these steps:
Open the File menu and select Print (or press Ctrl+P). The Print dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 11.3.
Figure 11.3. The Print dialog box.
Too Quick to Print
If you click the Print button instead of using the File, Print command, Excel prints your current worksheet without letting you make any selections.
Select the options you would like to use:
Page Range lets you print one or more pages. For example, if the selected print area will take up 15 pages and you want to print only pages 5–10, select Page(s), and then type the numbers of the first and last page you want to print in the From and To boxes.
Print What allows you to print the currently selected cells, the selected worksheets, or the entire workbook.
Copies allows you to print more than one copy of the selection, worksheet, or workbook.
Collate allows you to print a complete copy of the selection, worksheet, or workbook before the first page of the next copy is printed. This option is available when you print multiple copies.
Click OK or press Enter.
While your job is printing, you can continue working in Excel. If the printer is working on another job that you (or someone else, in the case of a network printer) sent, Windows holds the job until the printer is ready for it.
Sometimes you might want to delete a job while it is printing or before it prints. For example, suppose you think of other numbers to add to the worksheet or realize you forgot to format some text; you'll want to fix these things before you print the file. In such a case, deleting the print job is easy. To display the print queue and delete a print job, follow these steps:
Double-click the Printer icon on the Windows taskbar, and the print queue appears, as shown in Figure 11.4.
Figure 11.4. To stop a document from printing, use the print queue.
Click on the job you want to delete.
Clear the Queue!
To delete all the files from the print queue, open the Printer menu and select Purge Print Jobs. This cancels the print jobs, but doesn't delete the files from your computer.
Upgrade Tip
With Excel 97, you get a newly expanded capability to send your worksheet directly to the people who need it, instead of printing it. Open the File menu, select Send To, and then select the appropriate option: Mail Recipient (to send a workbook via an e-mail message), Routing Recipient (route a workbook over a local network through Microsoft Mail or cc:Mail to several people), or Exchange Folder (to post—copy—your workbook to a Microsoft Exchange server).
In this lesson, you learned how to print all or part of your workbook. In the next lesson, you will learn how to print large worksheets.