I received an Excel spreadsheet containing performance data from a financial company. When printing spreadsheet, it would not fit onto one page (even in landscape layout) but instead only about half the width of the spreadsheet printed on one page. How can I reduce the spreadsheet size to fit on one A4 page? A second question relates to text size. I receive many text-heavy documents, which are sent in quite large print and use a lot of ink when printing. Is there a way to reduce the text size, to reduce ink consumption on printing?

Excel has a handy feature which will automatically scale the spreadsheet to fit on a particular number of pages when printed. Open the Excel spreadsheet then go to the ‘File’ menu > ‘Page Setup’. In the window that appears, click the ‘Page’ tab. Under ‘Orientation’, select ‘Landscape’ and under ‘Scaling’ configure the spreadsheet to fit 1 page wide by 1 tall. This setting should scale the spreadsheet to print on one A4 page landscape (you can check this by going into the Print Preview). If you find the entire spreadsheet is not printed, the print area may need to be reset to ensure the entire spreadsheet is selected to print. First, we need to clear the print area. Go to the ‘File’ menu > ‘Print Area’ > ‘Clear Print Area’. Then, select the area of the spreadsheet you would like to print (in your case I imagine you will select all the data in the spreadsheet) and then go to the ‘File’ menu > ‘Print Area’ > ‘Set Print Area’. This will set the highlighted area to print. Then, go back into the Page Setup and specify you would like 1 wide by 1 tall printed, and then print the document.

Regarding your second question, the ability to reduce the text size in a received document depends on the format of the particular document. For example, if you receive a Word document you can manually reduce the font size. On the other hand, if you receive a PDF document you cannot edit the document and are therefore stuck with the original font size. That said, if you do encounter a document where you can edit the font size, you should be aware that changing the size of the font may also change the layout of the document (e.g. shift around pictures or graphics) as a result of the text size being altered. However, an easier way around this issue may be to print multiple pages of the document on a single A4 page. For example, you can print two-up (print two pages of a document on one single A4 page - i.e. each document is reduced to 50%) or four-up (print four pages on a single A4 page - i.e. each document is reduced to 25%). As this reduces the size of the entire page of the document, it will save you both paper and ink. To do this, go to the ‘File’ menu > ‘Print’ to open the print window. Then, select your printer and click the ‘Preferences’ (or ‘Properties’) button. In the next window, click the ‘Layout’ tab. For ‘Pages per sheet’ select how many pages you would like to print per sheet. You will see a sample of the printout appear in the window. Once you are happy with the layout, click OK to save the setting and OK again to print the document.