When I make a spreadsheet in Excel I have two frequent problems:
1- I print it out and it prints out 300 pages (2 of them my document and the other 298 blank sheets)
2- Sometimes when I scroll down the &#(*$ing thing gets carried away and LITERALLY goes all the way to row 40,000 and won’t behave.
Has anybody else had these problems and if so what do you do about it?
1 - Always do a print preview before sending the document to the printer. In all likelihood, you’ve put something (even a space, which wouldn’t show up as a character but counts as a character) in cell XY4598 and thus the program wants to print the “entire” document.
2 - I’m not sure if this is true, but I had a professor explain to me a few years ago that Microsoft’s scrolling is ridiculously fast because, way back when they first designed their programs, they didn’t put a limit on scrolling speed because processors then were slow enough that it never scrolled too fast. As processor speed increased scrolling speeds likewise increased, to the point of unusability.
As for the first problem, you have data in cells that is causing the problem. Did you apply borders that have gone beyond the 2 pages? Try this… Select the Alpha cells to the right of your data, and click and drag so that you have 4 or five columns highlighted. Then click EDIT, then click DELETE. Don’t just hit the delete button, you want to remove the cells entirely. Do the same thing for the numeric rows below your data. I find that this usually gets rid of unwanted formatting within the spreadsheet, that occasionally causes extra blank pages to print.
As for number 2… I usually stick with control-end/home, and Page Up/Down to manuver. I hate using my mouse.
Good Luck!
Often it will even be that you used to have data in cells all ythe way down there; highlighting rows at the end of your sheet and hitting delete only empties the cells, but it would seem that in some cases, Excel thinks you still want to print them.
Highlighting the rows and hitting <Ctrl>- (control-minus) deletes the actual rows themselves and usually fixes the problem for me.
Cool - I didn’t know the control-minus trick.
There’s my spot of knowledge for the day.
Thanks!
You can also highlight what you want to print, then go to file, print area, set print area. You should see a little dashed line outlining the data you want to print. When printing, it should only print the data within the dashed lines. Hope that helps.