Printing worksheets in PlanMaker

What can you do if a printed worksheet doesn't fit completely onto a page, for instance, or if you just want to print out part of the worksheet and not the whole thing?

Your results when printing out worksheets from PlanMaker essentially depend on three factors: the print range, the scaling mode and the repeating rows.

Print range

When you select the "Print" command in PlanMaker, the complete worksheet is always printed out by default (empty cells excluded).

What do you do if you just want to print out part of the worksheet? Simple, you define a print range. When you do that, only the cells located within the print range are active when you print out the worksheet. Nothing else gets printed.

You can define a custom print range for each worksheet in a spreadsheet file. You can do this really easily by simply highlighting the range you want to print and selecting File | Define print range.

In the above example, only the range between cell F1 and cell G11 would be printed.

Tip: If you selected a print range but then decide that you want to print the whole worksheet after all, you can just tick the "Ignore print range" box in the print dialog window.

Scaling mode

We've all run into this problem: you print out a worksheet, and then you notice that a single column spills over onto a second page. That's not only a waste of paper, but it also breaks up the reader's overview.

The solution: scale the printout. If the worksheet doesn't fit on a piece of paper at full-size, it might fit at 98% or 95%. The minimal difference in font size is nearly imperceptible to the eye.

To specify, how the content of a worksheet should be scaled when printed out, PlanMaker offers you five different scaling modes:

The default setting is a fixed scaling of 100% – that is, the widths of the columns and the height of the rows defined in the worksheet are printed out at a 1:1 scale.

If this results in columns unintentionally being distributed across several pages, it's easy to prevent this. All you have to do is select File | Page Setup | Options | Scaling options "Specify width in pages" and specify exactly one page as the width:

This lets you print worksheets – even sheets with many columns – conveniently and perfectly fitted to the width of a page; the height of the printout (and thus the number of pages) adapts to the number and height of the rows.

You can take a similar approach to printing worksheets with numerous rows on a desired number of pages. Select "Specify height in pages" from the "Scaling mode" drop-down menu.

If you want to make absolutely sure that your table will be printed on exactly one page, you can select the scaling mode "Specify number of pages in total" and enter the value 1 in the "Pages" field.

Please note that the scaling mode will be applied either to the print range or to the entire worksheet, depending on what is specified. Regardless of the selected scaling mode, the minimum zoom level is 20%, while the maximum zoom level is 200%.

Repeated rows and columns

For lists that span several printed pages, column headings can be repeated on each page of the printout. This makes tables easier for readers to follow because they always know which column is which.

You can set up these repeating rows under File | Page Setup | Options, "Repeated rows":

Once set up, the first row of the worksheet will appear at the top of every page:

Similarly, for very "wide" worksheets with many columns, columns can be repeated on each page of the printout.

Allowed values are whole numbers or areas defined with a colon. The entry "1:4" in the "Repeated rows" field would repeat rows one to four on every page of the printout.

We hope this article has given you some information you can use. In the comments section below, feel free to suggest other topics for us to address in the future.

Notice: This blog post appeared originally on June 24, 2016 and was updated on October 18, 2021 to include PlanMaker 2021.