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CB Casper wonders: <<We provide an HTML page created from an Excel file
that contains a large matrix of products and their suitability in
various other server products. We use Excel to allow us to format this
complicated table with enough cells to be readable... In order to get
the information readable, the spreadsheet is wider than a standard
paper page... We chose to provide this in HTML because we couldn't find
a way to format it such that it would print well.>>
Let's paraphrase your original question to clarify the problem: "How do
we print something on an 8.5x11 page that is too large to be legible if
we print it on an 8.5x11 page?" See the problem? <g>
The answer is that you can't do it, and probably shouldn't try. The
solution depends on understanding why there's so much data, the
relationships within the groups of data, and how that data will be
used.
For example, you may discover that the data falls into four natural
groups, each of which will be examined independantly and thus could be
presented on its own separate page. Alternatively, you might discover
that most readers only need a summary of the mass of data; in that
case, you could produce a summary spreadsheet optimized for printing on
a single page, but with hyperlinks that allow users to drill down to
see complete details for any given line item in the summary. That
breaks up the information into smaller chunks, each of which fits on
its own single page.
Or you might step back and realize that the optimal solution is
actually to provide a downloadable spreadsheet file that lets users
decide for themselves how to format, manipulate, pivot, summarize, and
drill down into the information. Or perhaps even treat this as a
perfect situation to use a query engine of some sort that polls a
database (your spreadsheet) and dynamically generates Web pages in
response to those queries.
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