The Print sheet

If your users need to print some of the information in a form or calculator, you may provide a specially formatted print sheet that looks better on paper than just a plain print or screenshot of the web page.

SpreadsheetConverter allows you to create a separate layout just for printing. Typically, the special print sheet just copies information from other cells in the form, but in a more printer-friendly layout. You designate the print sheet on the Worksheets tab of the task pane. In most cases, you will want to hide the print sheet.

The need for a separate print sheet

Let’s face it – spreadsheets were never easy to print. Excel invites you to design in a landscape format that often becomes too wide for most printers.

Web pages can be tricky to print, too. They can be designed for legibility, which means there is a lot of guidance and helpful information. There can be an excessive use of color and graphical symbols that isn’t optimized for printing.

If you are viewing a web page that uses responsive design for easier viewing on a narrow screen, printing it may create less than optimal results where only the left-most portion of each page is used.

To help you overcome issues like this, we designed the Print Sheet option. The print sheet is just like any other worksheet – you add text and formulas to it so that it contains the information you want to print. You can format the print sheet so that it fits the kind of printers you intend to use it with.

Using a print sheet

Let’s assume you have a little “wizard” as we call them, a web form consisting of multiple steps.

The first step asks for some information, after which the user presses Next.

The second step asks for some other information, then Next.

There is also a third step in the wizard.

Printing this form would require three printed pages, with very little information on each page. But when we press Print, the printed output actually looks like this:

This is because the form has a print sheet designated for it on the Worksheets tab. The print sheet is not visible on the web page but automatically used when printing.

The layout of the print sheet is simple, it just aggregates the contents of the three wizard steps into one page.

Details

Printing operations

SpreadsheetConverter supports three printing operations:

• Print All – prints all worksheets separately, without using the print sheet.
• Print This – prints the current worksheet, without using the print sheet.
• Print – prints the print sheet. If a print sheet hasn’t been selected, it prints the current worksheet.

If you initiate the print operation from the web browser with the Print menu option or the Ctrl-P keyboard shortcut, it corresponds to the Print operation in the list above.

Create the print sheet

In Excel, you create a print sheet just like any other worksheet. Just click on the small plus sign to the right of the rightmost worksheet tab.

Name the print sheet

You can give the print sheet any name you like, as long as it follows our general guidelines. Double-click on the tab name to change it. To reorder the tabs, just drag them to the positions you want.

Select the print sheet

You select the print sheet by clicking on the corresponding printer symbol on the Worksheets tab. Only one worksheet can be selected as the print sheet. To unselect the currently selected print sheet, click on the printer symbol again.

The print sheet is not hidden by default, but it’s unlikely that you want the print sheet to be visible in the converted web page. In most cases, you should hide it using the left-hand column, like in the example above. During the development of the print sheet, we recommend that you leave it visible so that the formatted result appears in the Live Preview.

Fill the print sheet with content

In most cases, you want to copy content from the visible, web-formatted worksheets to the hidden print worksheet. Just enter an equal sign in the field, switch to the other worksheet and click in the cell you want to copy.

In the example below

1. we selected cell B3 in the Print sheet
2. clicked on the Name tab
3. selected cell B1
4. pressed Enter.

Use Wrap Text for multiline text fields

To print a multiline text field properly in a merged cell, ensure that you have enabled the Wrap text setting for the merged cell.

Format the print sheet

To format the page, you just use the ordinary Excel formatting options and use Live Preview to verify the result on the screen.

For last-minute adjustment of the page width and height, we recommend that you use the print preview option in your web browser to see the page when it has been formatted for printing.

When you have done most of the design work, it is likely that you will want to hide the print sheet using the settings on the Worksheets tab.