Worksheet looks good in print, not so good on-screen

[Guest]

I have a problem with a worksheet that needs to "look good" both in print and
when displayed in Excel. Many of the cells contain text. The problem is that
the line breaks seems to be different on-screen vs. in print. That is, some
cells require only one line when printed, but on the display they wrap to 2
lines. Does anyone know why this is? And what I can do to make the on-screen
display "match" the printed output?

I'm not using AutoFit for the row height. I need some white space between
the rows, so I'm manually setting the row height.

Thanks,

Betsy

 

[Guest]

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

 

[Jay Somerset]

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-

 

[Jon Peltier]

Another suggestion is to use two sheets, one optimized for viewing on
screen, the other for printing. Link one to the other so the values stay
current.

- Jon

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the reply--you've saved me a lot of time trying to figure out this
limitation for myself.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the additional info!

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-

 

[Guest]

Another good suggestion--thank!

Another suggestion is to use two sheets, one optimized for viewing on
screen, the other for printing. Link one to the other so the values stay
current.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
http://PeltierTech.com
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