Printing out Excel spreadsheets can be frustrating. Often you end up with one piece of paper with only one column of data on! If you are printing a spreadsheet that will take up more than one page, you have the ability to control were the page breaks.
To do this you need to be in the Page Break Preview. The instructions below are for Excel 2007 and later.
To enable Page Break Preview:
Go to the View tab
Click on the Page Break Preview button in the Workbook Views group.
The view of your document will change to something like this:
The blue line(s) represent where the page breaks are. Simply drag them up or down, left or right and position them where you want the pages to break. If the line is dashed, it is a line that Excel has inserted itself. If the blue line is solid, it is one that the user has changed.
To insert a page break manually:
Put the cursor where you would like the break to be
In the Page Layout tab, click Breaks then Insert Page Break.
If you’d like to learn more about page breaks and controlling your Excel printouts, attend our Excel Intermediate training course which run in London and UK wide. You’ll also cover IF functions, conditional formatting and many more interesting topics.
When you have worked hard to set up and create an Excel workbook, which may include 3D formulas, pivot tables and links to other key worksheets, you will want to protect your work from unwanted changes.
Excel allows you to protect your worksheets work and allow editing
It isn’t just about stopping people from making changes to Excel documents. You may want colleagues to enter data, and to focus on that – and not to worry about how the formulas work.
Protecting data to maintain confidentiality
Some worksheets are, by their nature, confidential. Staff salary information for example, occupational health records or commercially sensitive data such as information on competitors or financial data.
Excel has a range of options available to you for protecting your work, from individual cells to worksheets, or workbooks. These options are available in the Review tab, under the Changes section, and in the backstage view.
The Review tab has protection functions for you to apply, depending on your needs..
Protecting your Excel Workbooks
Protection via Read-only status You can protect your Excel document by making it read-only. Your colleagues or clients can read the document, analyse the data in it, but not edit it, add to it, or change a thing.
Mark as Final
With this option, no-one can edit your document as the features that allow editing, are not available.
Encryption
This protects a document by applying a password system – but be warned, if you have to try and remember fifty squillion different passwords at work, this may tip you over the edge. If you forget the password for your Excel document, you won’t be able to get a reminder. If you use this, find a way to remember your passwords.
Other options for protecting parts of your Excel Workbook
Locking Cells
This feature allows you to protect individual cells – useful for protecting your formulas or links. The rest of your worksheet is unprotected. This option works well where colleagues share a document and are responsible for updating your database, but don’t have the expertise to set up the formulas.
Using permissions Excel allows you to set up permissions using your Windows accounts and IDs. Here, you can set permissions for certain users only. This option is suitable if your document is in a shared drive and you want to protect sensitive or confidential data.
The backstage view has tools available to protect your work, or set permissions.
Protect your workbook by setting up digital signatures.
In the backstage view you can apply a digital signature, which can be invisible to other users.
You can use one or a a combination of these protection options to protect your worksheet. Protecting your work is included in our Excel training courses.
