Printing Excel Spreadsheets On One Page Width

One annoying thing that happens frequently when attempting to print an Excel spreadsheet is the fact that it is sometimes difficult to fit the contents onto one page width. What do I mean by this?

Have you ever printed a spreadsheet in which the main contents will appear on, say, the first three pages; however, you get three more pages of random contents that spilled over onto separate pages due to the fact that your table was too wide to fit on one page? (wow, what a long question).


If this has ever happened to you, then here are a couple of quick fixes. First, make sure that your Page Orientation is Landscape instead of Portrait.

• Click on File on the menu bar. Click on Page Setup. The Page Setup dialog box will appear.
  
• Make sure you are looking at the Page tab.
  
• Select Landscape under Orientation.

If this does not fix the problem, then you can automatically shrink your worksheet to one page wide.

• Click on File>Page Setup again.
• Make sure you are looking at the Page tab.
• Under Scaling, see where it says Fit to ??? page(s) wide by ??? tall.
• Select that option and make it such that it will be one page wide. This will automatically shrink the text so that it appears on one page wide.
  
• Seeing that we do not necessarily need the table to fit on one page tall, you can change the number tall to anything obtuse (like 500). Excel will not stretch your document so that it is 500 pages long; but if your worksheet is longer than 500 pages long, then it will shrink the text. We don't really want to shrink the text this way, which is why I suggest entering in a large obtuse number that you will hopefully never approach.

So, next time you are helping a customer who can't seem to get their Excel table on one page width, just show them this handy-dandy trick.

What Do "Broken Printers" and MisGuided Zoom Settings Have In Common?

I was working this past Sunday when a customer approached me saying, "Your printer is not working right."

Hmmm. After some clarification, she explained that she had been increasing the font-size of her Word document but the printer kept printing her document in the original smaller-size font. I asked to look at her document, so we went to her computer and sure enough, the words in her document were very large on the screen.

I instantly knew what happened, and if you have taken the What's Wrong With My Document? class, you may know what had happened as well. View the prensentation below to find out what happened and how to fix it.

Can Customers Use Our Printers to Print from Their Laptops? Quick Answer: No

Someone recently asked this question:

I have a customer who asked about bringing his laptop to the branch and wanted to know if he could print from his laptop onto our computers?? Can he?

Unfortunately, technological limitations prevent us from allowing customers to use our print system with their laptops.

So how do we help this customer that wants to print something on their laptop?

If the customer wants to print a document (Word, Excel, etc.), then we need to find a way to move the file from the laptop to one of our public computers. If the customer has a flash drive, then we are in business. Of course, you can always have the customer e-mail the document to their own e-mail account. The customer can then access the attachment from their e-mail account via a public computer.

If the customer wants to print a web page, you can ask them to access the web page on a public computer and print. HINT: If the URL is extremely lengthy, they can copy and paste it into an e-mail message.

Frayser PDF Asking For a Default Printer

Dean Moore from Frayser submitted this question to the Ask the Technical Trainer today:

Hi Kevin, this morning we had a customer attempt to print from a PDF, and the message said to access the default printer via the control panel. As you know we cannot access the control panel on the public computers. Is there some way to enable customers to print from these files? I know many of these are applications/forms that cannot be copied and pasted into word as well.

Has anyone else received a message such as this when trying to print a PDF?

How do we troubleshoot this? Adobe provides a list of troubleshooting techniques that you can use. After scanning those techniques, I have a couple of suggestions:

1. Try printing from another computer.

2. When the Print Dialog box appears, what does it say toward the top left. This is where it says what printer it will be using (see picture). Does it say "Xerox..."? If it does not, then this is probably our problem. It would be time to notify the Help Desk. If it does say "Xerox..." then we can move on.

3. Does the same message appear when you try to print another PDF? You can use the Public Computer Class Calendar as the test PDF. If the message does not appear, then we have narrowed the problem down to the one PDF (skip to step 4).

If the same message does appear, then it is safe to assume that all PDFs are having problems. At this point you would need to print another type of document (Word, Web, Excel, anything but PDF). If the same message appears, then it is not a PDF problem, it would probably be a network printer problem (time to call the Help Desk). If the message does not appear, then we can safely assume that the problem is isolated to PDFs.

4. Try any number of these measures to see if it fixes this temporary problem:

4A. Print the document as an image:

1. Choose File > Print, and then click Advanced.
2. Select Print As Image.
3. Click OK to close the Advanced Print Setup dialog box, and then click Print.

4B. Save the document to the local computer. Using File>Save As... will rewrite the file.

4C. Download the file again (if retrieved from the Web in the first place). Perhaps something happened in the download process.

5. If all else fails, you can always use the Snapshot Tool on the PDF toolbar to copy and paste the image to Word. The Snapshot Tool looks like a camera. Click on it and click and drag over the entire page. This automatically copies the page as an image. You can then paste the image into Word.

Hopefully we can find some way to help the customer receive a print version of the PDF. If this is a recurring problem, the HelpDesk would need to be notified.

Is Your Public Printer Offline?

I worked this past Sunday, and it was a similar scene from the Cooper Young Festival the day before. Except replace beer, shopping, and music with computers and printers. On the second floor, I noticed an Out of Order sign on one of the public printers (there are 2 public printers on the 2nd floor).

I had a sneaky suspicion that there was indeed nothing "wrong" with the printer. I grabbed the LINC courtesy card and put it into the card reader for the printer. Sure enough, it was just as I thought. The card reader was "Offline".

To fix this, press CTRL+ALT+DELETE on the keyboard. This brings up the Windows Security box that has several buttons. Click on the Log Off... button. The Print Station will log off and then automatically log back in. The Pharos printing program will load and the station is ready to go.

Is the Printer Cutting You Off?

NOTE: The HTML2PDF tool is no longer a free tool.

Have you ever printed a web page, or helped a customer print a web page, in which the edge of the page was cut off? One work-around some staff have implemented is copying and pasting the web page into a Word document. This works but can be a bit clunky.

Well, the Librarian in Black passed on a useful site that I think will revolutionize our customer interactions in these scenarios. It is called HTML2PDF:

http://html2pdf.seven49.net/

That's right. Just enter the web address and click on "Render HTML to PDF Now!". You will then be asked if you want to Save or Open the file. You should select Open. And there it is! A PDF version of the web page.

This still does not solve the problem of printing web pages that are made of frames. You know what I am talking about. One of those pages where everything is divided into sections. You tell it to print and you end up with nothing or just the part of the page that was on the screen and nothing else.

Well, hopefully we will not have to deal with that much longer as web page developers are moving away from using frames. Follow this link to see what I think about frames. On this site, you see how printing is a fundamental problem with frames. So this is NOT OUR FAULT, folks.

If you need to print a web page made of frames, it is best to highlight the information needed, click on File > Print, and click on the Selection radio button.

Word: Page Border Printing Problems

Someone recently asked this question: Whenever I add a page border in Microsoft Word, the printer always cuts off the bottom border. How can I avoid that?

Well, I did some research and found out the best way to avoid that problem.

1. Go to File>Page Setup. A dialog box will appear that consists of three tabs (Margins, Paper, and Layout).
   
2. Click on the Paper tab.
   
3. You will notice that the paper size is 8 1/2" X 11".
   
4. Change the paper height to 10.8" or less if needed.
   

Your page border will now appear when you print. Basically, you told Word that your page is shorter than 11" so the border moves up into the printable area.

Here is a link to Microsoft's suggestions.