Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Printing Worksheets

Now that you’ve gone through the trouble of making your sheets look their best with killer formatting and awe-inspiring charts, and you’re set to print them out (and show them off).

Print Preview

Viewing a print preview before you send your spreadsheet to the printer can save you frustration and time, and help save an old-growth forest that would otherwise be harvested for the sake of your botched spreadsheet printouts. If you’ve used previous versions of Excel, you may recall that both Excel and Mac OS X had very similar print-preview functions. For Excel 2008, Microsoft has done away with the program’s Print Preview altogether—a shockingly un-Microsoftian feature-reduction if ever there was one—leaving the print-preview function now entirely up to Mac OS X.

Tip

To check out your page-break preview without doing a print preview first, just choose View → Page Layout View or click the Page Layout View button at the bottom-left of the Excel window.

As in any Mac OS X–compatible program, you turn a document into a print-preview file by choosing File → Print and then, in the Print dialog box, clicking the Preview button at the bottom. Your Mac fires up the Preview program, where you see the printout-to-be as a PDF. Use the commands in the Display menu to zoom in, zoom out, scroll, and so on. Each page appears as a separate page image, with thumbnails of all the pages lined up in Preview’s drawer at the side of the window.

Tip

To print just a certain portion of your spreadsheet, ...