How To Set Print Area in Excel

You might not always need to print all the content of a huge Excel spreadsheet. What if you need to include the cells in a spreadsheet but not its graphs? Or perhaps you only need to include a more specific range of cells in the printed output? Under such circumstances, printing the whole spreadsheet is going to waste ink and paper. However, there are a few ways to configure the print area so that your printed output includes only the sheet content required.

The Print Area Option

Excel includes a Print Area option on its Page Layout tab. That’s probably the best option to configure printed spreadsheet output with. The option enables you to select more specific cell range areas to include in the final printouts. Thus, cells that aren’t within a printout area are left out of the printed output.

First, select a range of cells within a spreadsheet to include within the print area by holding the left mouse button and dragging the cursor over. Click Print Area on the Page Layout tab. Select the Set Print Area option shown in the snapshot directly below.

Now press the Print Titles button to open the Page Setup window. Click Print Preview to open a preview of the printed spreadsheet. Now that will include only the cells you selected for the printout area.

If you need to enlarge a selected print area, select the Add to Print Area option. You can only select that option when you’ve already set a printout area. Then select some adjacent cells to add to the original print area. If the newly selected cells aren’t next to the original printout area, they’re included in an additional printing area on a separate page. Press the Print Area button, and select Add to Print Area to expand the original printout area with the selected cells.

To reset the print area, you can select a Clear Print Area option. That erases all the selected printing areas. Press Print Area and select Clear Print Area to remove all the printout areas from the spreadsheet.

Printing Graphs

If you only need to print a few graphs in a spreadsheet, you don’t always need to set a print area for them. Instead, select a chart on the sheet with cursor. Then the print preview will only include the selected graph as shown in the snapshot below.

Alternatively, select the range of blank cells that include the graph to be the printed area as shown below. Then click Print Area and Set Print Area to set up the printing area. Now the printed output will include just the chart and the selected empty cells.

Print Multiple Cell Ranges in One Page with Kutools

If you select multiple print areas in an Excel spreadsheet, Excel includes page breaks between them. Consequently, each printout area prints on separate paper. This wastes paper, but you can print multiple cell ranges onto a single sheet of paper with the Kutools add-on. That’s an add-on with more than 200 additional Excel tools, which is retailing at $39.

When you’ve added Kutools to Excel, you can remove page breaks from multiple printout areas with the Print Multiple Selection Wizard tool. Click the Enterprise tab, press the Printing button and select Print Multiple Selections Wizard. That opens a Print Multiple Selections Wizard from which you can select the cell ranges to include on the printout.

Click the + button on the dialog box to select the cell ranges to include on the page printout. You can press the Up and Down buttons to rearrange the cell range references. Click the Next button to open printing options.

It’s not essential to adjust the page setup settings to remove page breaks. However, you can select Specify new print settings to configure a new page setup if required. Selecting the Add a blank row between ranges option adds extra spacing between the selected print areas on the new worksheet.

Click Next to select an option for the new worksheet that includes the selected cell areas. Select the Activate the worksheet, but don’t print it option, which opens the sheet in Excel so that you can make further adjustments before printing. Then when you press Next, the selected print areas are copied to one new worksheet as picture objects as shown below. You can drag the printout areas to alter their positions on the sheet. Click Page Layout > Print Titles > Print to print the new page out.

So that’s how you can configure the print area in Excel 2016, 2013 and 2010. The Set Print Area option and Print Multiple Selection Wizard in Kutools can save you lofts of ink and paper. You can also save ink by configuring Excel’s Fit to scaling option on the Page Setup window to fit all printed spreadsheet content on one page only.