Printing Spreadsheets
Several options control the printed output of your Calc spreadsheets. Some of the default settings have been changed for the next OOo 2.3 version.
One remark first: in a Writer text document, you normally observe that each page on screen will be printed on one page of paper. This is how Writer is designed to work. But this is not how Calc is designed to work.
A Calc document can contain several sheets with data. Each sheet can be much bigger than you would want to print on one page of paper. So you are in control to specify what to print and what not to print. Calc has all the controls ready that you need to finetune printing.
Another remark: the Export to PDF feature works basically the same as printing. The settings for printing will be also the settings for the exported PDF file.
To print the current sheet
To print all data cells from the current sheet, just execute the Print command.
If your data covers many pages of paper, you can setup properties like the page order or scaling:
Choose Format – Page and click the Sheet tab.
If there are some large gaps between your data cells that would result in empty pages to be output from the printer, don't worry. You can select to suppress empty pages when printing in two similar looking dialog boxes. To suppress empty pages from printing is a new default setting in OOo 2.3.
To change the default for all print jobs, choose Tools – Options – OOo Calc – Print.
To change the setting for just one print job, choose File – Print, then click the Options button.
In addition, the Print only selected sheets option is now enabled by default. The selected sheet is normally the one you are watching on screen. You can click another sheet tab in the lower left corner of the Calc screen to make that the selected sheet. The selected sheet tab is highlighted.
To select multiple sheets, hold down Ctrl while you click the tabs. But be aware that when you select multiple sheets and enter some data into a cell, the same data will be entered on all selected sheets. You may want this to save some time, or you may hate this if you do not know this feature.
To preview the print output on screen
There are two different windows where you can preview the printing output.
Choose View – Page Break Preview to open an interactive window where you can see and change the data that will be printed on each page of paper.
In this window, you can see the page breaks as blue lines. You can grab a blue line and move it to set the page break to a new position. The scaling will be set automatically to print the data.
Choose View – Normal to get back to the normal Calc window.
Choose File – Page Preview to see the same preview that you may already know from Writer documents.
Unlike in Writer, the page preview of Calc does not offer too many options, so we'll click the Close Preview button to go back to the normal document view.
To print a range of cells
If you always want to print only selected cells, you can define those cells to be part of a print range.
Select all cells that are to be printed.
Choose Format – Print Ranges – Define.
You can visually add another print range on a sheet or change the print ranges on the Page Break Preview.
Choose View – Page Break Preview.
Select some cells.
Right-click to open the context menu and choose your command.
Now when you print or export to PDF, you see only the cells from the print range. If your print range spans multiple sheets, by default you now see only the cells from the selected sheet or sheets (see the “Print only selected sheets” option mentioned above).
To print only some pages of paper
You may want to print only some pages of paper. For example, when you want to print all the odd numbered pages first, then flip over the paper sheets and reinsert them into the printer to print the even numbered pages on the other side.
Choose File – Print, then select All, Pages, or Selection.
The range of printed output that you select here is the last filter in the chain. When you select All, you will get all the pages according to the other settings of print ranges, suppressed pages, and selected sheets. The printed pages are numbered from 1 to n.
Enter a list of page numbers to print only the pages with the numbers you enter, from all the content that you have defined by "selected sheets" and "print ranges".
When you suppress some empty pages,
this will change the numbers of the printed pages that follow the empty
pages. So when you enter something like 4-6 in the Pages box, the printer will print the pages 4, 5, and 6 from the current "All" pile of pages.
When you select some cells from your sheet and click Selection in the Print dialog box, this will override any defined print range.
I have some problems with the "suppress output of empty pages" feature.
It seems that if a page contains only one cell with a value, that shows nothing (e.g. =""), the empty page is not suppressed during printing.
The same is the case, if a page contains a value written with the colour white.
Posted by Jesper Olsen on October 27, 2007 at 05:20 PM CEST #