While there are many good reasons to go to a paperless system, sometimes you just need to print out a spreadsheet. Let's look at a few aspects of printing a spreadsheet and how to format them to come out in a decent way.
Let's assume we would like to print out the whole gradebook. To get a quick idea of what it will look like on paper if we do nothing to the spreadsheet, you can use "Print Preview." Click on the Print Preview button in the toolbar (or find the Print Preview item under the File menu).
When you do this, you will get a view of your gradebook that very likely will not work for you. Typically with a gradebook, you will have too many columns to fit the gradebook on a single page. Also, the helpful grid lines that let you line up grades and students are gone.
Let's do a few things to try to get this spreadsheet to fit on a single page. First, let's make the rows and columns as small as possible. This will shrink the horizontal width of what you're trying to print to make it fit on a page better. If you're in Print Preview mode, click the "Close" button to go back to the spreadsheet. Select one or more columns that you would like to change in width.
Then, as covered in Tech Tip #3, shrink the width of these columns.
You can see in the above screen shots how much we were able to shrink the horizontal width. Shrink all the columns as much as you can and still be able to read the numbers.
Once you've done that, we can quickly tell if we've shrunk the columns enough to fit on a page by looking at the page boundary lines Excel puts in the spreadsheet. You may notice in the picture below the dashed line between columns N and O (the ones for "Project" and "Final Grade"). That is the page boundary - basically anything to the left of it will appear on one page and anything to the right will appear on another. If you can shrink your columns so everything fits to the left of the page boundary line, it should all fit on a single page. NOTE: the page boundary line only appears AFTER you have looked at Print Preview at least once.
In our case, we did not get all the grades on a single page, so let's try the next tactic: switch to Landscape mode. This will print the gradebook sideways on a page, giving us more horizontal width at the expense of vertical length. To switch between portrait (default) and landscape, go to the menu File-Page Setup. Also, if you are in Print Preview mode, you can click the "Setup" button. On this new window, click the circle beside Landscape and click "OK."
If you are in Print Preview mode, you will see the page change and how your spreadsheet will look. If you are just looking at the spreadsheet normally, you will see the page boundary lines move to their new locations with the change in the size of the page.
Typically, the combination of these two will get your spreadsheet to fit. If it still does not, there are two more options. Go to Print Preview mode and click the "Setup" button. You see (as in the screen shot above) a header "Scaling." You can manually select a smaller percentage after "Adjust to:" to make the spreadsheet smaller (like zooming). Or, you can have Excel do the work in the next option and tell it to fit the spreadsheet however it can into the number of pages you select high and tall. Try a few combinations to see what makes sense for you.
With these tools you should be able to fit your gradebook on a small number of pages. However, it may look like the below example, with no grid lines to help guide your eye as you look at student grades.
Let's make this easier to read by putting some grid lines on here. Select the cells where you want to put in grid lines. You likely do not want to select all the cells in the gradebook, but only those that contain headers and grades. One example is below.
Notice that I did not select the cell with the word "Homework" in it. Since that's a major heading for several columns, I won't want it to appear like it only applies to a single cell or two. There are multiple ways to put gridlines around cells - I will show one here. Once you have selected the cells you want, put the mouse cursor somewhere in the selection and right click to bring up the menu. Select the "Format Cells" item.
There will be several tabs on the window that comes up. Select the "Border" tab.
The simplest thing to do is just click the "Outline" and "Inside" buttons to add a simple border around all the selected cells. You can get fancy and add multiple line thicknesses, colors, styles, or only put borders on some of the sides of a cell. You can experiment on your own. When you're satisfied, click OK. You will now see a black border around the cells you selected.
If you switch to Print Preview, you will see that this makes a significant difference in readability for those cells.
In this example, I only gave a border to the homework grades for space reasons. You can select cells for all your grades and give them a border.
Well, that wraps up the Tech Tips on creating a Gradebook in Excel. I hope that was useful AND helped you learn some things about Excel you may not have known. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me or leave a comment here.
No comments:
Post a Comment