Office Version:Office 2007
Operating System:Windows XP

Our organization has a hundred printer makes and models. We all use Office 2007, and we all print to letter size (8.5" x 11") paper. However, when someone distributes an Excel spreadsheet across our organization, it prints with awkward page breaks in many or most of our users.


For example, Sue sets her worksheet to print all in one page, then saves it and emails it to Becky and Anne. When Becky opens the email and clicks "Print", the printer puts out 2 or 4 pages. More-so, when Becky and Anne print to the same physical printer, their printouts' page breaks are different.

• It is especially annoying if the worksheet has charts and graphs.

Is it possible to do something on Sue's end to prevent this? Is there anything that can be done? We spend enormous time "fixing" every attachment prior to printing. Please help.

Hi,
this is a really tricky issue. I have been "googling around" and found out that many many persons are suffering from this problem and that there are no perfect solution (hardly any at all). Things like printer brands, printer drivers and even screen resolution could affect this.

Here are two alternative ways forward:

1) The only solution that for sure will give exactly the same printout for everyone, is to create a pdf-file of the printout. If this is possible for you to use, this will probably be a really good solution.

2) This is more a solution in the direction "let's see if this creates less errors". The basic principle is to adopt the page breaks to the "person" who gets most pages, when doing a printout (see more info below). You should also make sure to have enough "space" around your "pages", thus better avoiding overflow to the next page. As someone on the net wrote: "If you have an almost overfull bucket with water, you will easily loose some water over the edge". Also "fixed page breaks" are to recommend here, instead of leeting Excel creating them dynamically.

To find the person where "most pages will be printed" you could use this little test to find out numbers of pages (horisontally and vertically). Fill an Excel sheet cells A1:IV3000 with a "0" (zero) in each cell. Fill cells D1:IV3000 with a "1" (one) in each cell. adjust the column width to 5 for all columns (A:IV). If you now make a "preview printout", you will get a lot of pages and you will also see how many pages you have "vertically", since this is where the zeros no longer show up. For me that is in the middle of page 54 (53,5).

The total number of pages for me is 972 (no I didn't print them on paper ), which equals 54 x 18. This means that the printout is 54 pages "high" (= vertically) and 18 pages wide (= horisontally).

If you adopt fix page breaks (Insert / Page break) based on the person who get most pages, there would "quite likely" not be an "overflow to next page" for other persons, since their "pages" in general seems to be able to hold more information (because they had fever pages in the test above).

I hope this is some steps in the right direction.

Kind regards
Bjorn