Microsoft Excel: Printing all sheets

Q. I have an Excel workbook with 13 worksheets, and I want to print all the worksheets at once instead of one at a time. Should I write a macro to do this?

A. While a macro could be created to print all of your worksheets as a single print job, this is not the best approach. The easiest approach is to right-click a worksheet tab, choose Select All Sheets, and then print normally to have the worksheets printed as a single print job. As an alternative you could also select File, Print, Settings, Print Entire Workbook to achieve the same result.

Here are a few additional comments about printing multiple worksheets as a single print job.

1. Page numbering. Besides speed, an additional benefit of printing multiple worksheets as a single print job is that all of your pages are numbered sequentially.

2. Custom print settings for each worksheet. Excel’s Page Layout tab’s Page Setup menu allows you to customize the way each worksheet prints, even when multiple worksheets are selected for printing. For example, Sheet 1 may be set to print in a Landscape orientation, Scaled to fit the width of the paper, while Sheet 2 may be set to print in Portrait orientation with No Scaling; thereafter, each worksheet adheres to those settings, even when both worksheets are printed as a single print job. To customize a worksheet’s layout, select it and, from the Page Layout tab, use the Margins, Orientation, Size, Print Area, Breaks, Background, and Print Titles tools (pictured below) to adjust each worksheet’s layout settings.

3. Printing selected worksheets. Instead of printing all worksheets, you can print selected worksheets as a single print job by holding the Ctrl key and left-clicking each tab you want to print with your mouse pointer (to select them). For example, in the screenshot below, I have selected the tabs labeled January, March, April, and June, which enables me to print those four worksheets only.

4. Specifying print range. By default, Excel prints all data contained on each worksheet, but you can specify a print range for each worksheet using the Page Layout‘s, Print Area, Set Print Area tool; thereafter, only the specified area will print.

About the author

J. Carlton Collins (carlton@asaresearch.com) is a technology consultant, a CPE instructor, and a JofA contributing editor.

Note: Instructions for Microsoft Office in “Technology Q&A” refer to the 2007 through 2016 versions, unless otherwise specified.

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