Excel wierdness

Subject: Excel wierdness
From: Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>
To: TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2004 12:16:59 -0500

So some business wonk needs a spreadsheet printed in color on 11x17 paper and that means I'm gonna be involved because I control the only printer capable of that and damned if I'm gonna let just anybody access it.

Well, it's a lot of columns and when it gets squeezed down to fit the type is kinda tiny, so the idea is to resize the columns as narrow as possible to minimize the shrinkage. Okay, Excel provides a simple trick for this. Just click on the boundary between column letters and the column auto-resizes to the minimum needed. Fine.

But when I print the sheet, there are fat margins in the columns, and clearly they could have been narrower. Hmmm. Well, it turns out that Excel is mostly concerned with the GDI and sizes the columns based on the screen rendering of the fonts, not the printer width of the fonts. So I bumped up the zoom to 100% (which, after some testing, turned out to be the optimal size), clicked all the columns again, and they got much narrower. When I reprinted the sheet, there was much less wasted space.

Just something to store in the back of your head for the next time you need to print something from Excel.

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