View Single Post
  #6   Report Post  
Posted to microsoft.public.excel.misc
Betsy Betsy is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 32
Default Worksheet looks good in print, not so good on-screen

Thanks for the additional info!

"Jay Somerset " wrote:

On Tue, 6 Feb 2007 12:41:08 -0800, Dave F
wrote:

Excel isn't really designed as a "What you see is what you get" program. It
has a number of idiosyncracies, especially with AutoFit and column widths.

Usually I find that I can either get the print layout as I want it, or the
screen layout as I want it but not both.

Dave


Sometimes this difference between displayed and printed column widths is
caused by using a zoom factor (other than 100%). Different fonts and font
sizes seem to scale slightly differently when the screen display is zoomed.
I use 75% zoom with 10-point Arial or Courier New (you need a reasonably
good hi-res monitor to see this easily) but still have to make some columns
wider to display a number than is needed for printing. Using a fixed-width
font like Courier makes column widths more predictable, but many people
prefer proportional fonts.

My recommendations: use a font size that prints the way you want, and a
screen zoom factor that lets you see as much of the sheet as possible in
terms of the size of the characters on the screen that you can tolerate.
Then, for printing, use the widest margins that you can get away with on
your printer, put in forced page breaks, and force print scaling to whatever
number of horizontal and vertical pages gives you an acceptable layout.
-Jay-