Category: Printing

Print Screen and the Snipping tool

There are a couple of points in the exam where you’re expected to show evidence of using a particular tool. The point of this is to show you’ve actually used the tool, rather than just guessed.

You will need to provide evidence in the form of a screenshot (sometimes also called screenprint, screengrab or screendump) which is a photo of your computer screen, taken by the computer, which you can then paste into a given worksheet.

Note: Laptop users might need to press Print Screen in combination with another key (like the Fn key) in order for it to work.

There are two ways you can approach this. I’ll go into them below, but I’d like to discuss a couple of issues first.

A puzzling instruction

In one of the older mocks, I noticed a set of instructions which asked you to do a Goal Seek, but before clicking OK to take a screenshot and paste it into another worksheet, before returning and clicking OK.

This is quite a bonkers instruction, because you can’t do it.

Why not? You can’t do anything while you have a dialog box open. In this example, you have the Goal Seek dialog box open, so UNLESS and UNTIL you click the OK button you CANNOT do anything else!

So unless you already know this, you’re actually completely stuck.

I note they’ve amended it now, but imagine coming across this in the exam and not being aware? Crumbs. Do be aware that in an effort to reflect the exams as much as possible, your mocks might have a daft instruction like this. It’s unlikely, but you never know!

If they do, take the screenprint, click Cancel, go to the worksheet and paste it in, go back to the other worksheet and do your Goal Seek (or whatever) properly this time.

What to take a screenshot of

You will be given very specific instructions about what to evidence, so please make sure you follow the steps, in their sequence, to the letter. This is an example from one of the mocks:

This is to evidence that you have chosen the correct input cells and ‘set value to’ in your Goal Seek. If you click OK and then take a screenshot, you’ll not be providing evidence of the dialog box.

This would not be good enough either, as it’s empty:

Please be careful – the example I have above is only worth 2 marks, but in some cases that could be the difference between one grade and the next!

Being neat

A screenshot takes an image of the entire monitor, which could be fun if you have a big screen or use dual monitors. Alternatively, you can home in on the bits that count.

  1. You can take a screenprint of the ‘active window’ – i.e. a dialog box you have open – by holding the Alt key down as you press PrtScn.
  2. Use the Snipping Tool (see below).
  3. Crop your image once you’ve pasted it in.

Given that suggestion 3 is a bit of a faff, I’d avoid it. Seriously – don’t worry too much in the exam, so long as you can see evidence of what you did, so can the examiner, and I suspect the marking team will have seen all kinds of odd stuff and passed it – I know I have when I was marking exams! So long as it shows what I needed it to show, I didn’t mind even if I had to scroll to the ends of the earth to find it.

How to take a Screenshot

  1. Look on your keyboard, off to the right at the top. Locate the button called Print Screen – it might also be called PrtScn or similar. Laptop users might need to press it in combination with another key (like the Fn key) in order for it to work.
  2. Press the button. Nothing appears to happen. Don’t panic – this is completely normal! What’s happened is that your computer has memorised what is on the screen, almost like an internal photograph.
  3. Finish off what you were doing, if you need to (like clicking OK on a dialog box).
  4. Go to the location where you need to add your evidence.
  5. Make sure you’re somewhere like cell A1. The top left hand corner of your image will start in whichever cell is your active cell (that’s the one with the big thick border round it), so you want to be close to the top and the left – although it doesn’t matter too much, so long as your data is there.
  6. Click Paste, or
    Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+V, or
    Right-click and choose Paste.

So to summarise, that’s press PrtScn / finish task / paste.

The Snipping Tool/Snip & Sketch

This is a tool which is operated from a small window, but which can be quite hard to find. It’s very useful, though!

Snipping Tool was replaced by Snip & Sketch – they operate in exactly the same way, so following the instructions for one will apply to the other without any issues. Below I refer to ‘Snipping Tool’ but if you are using Snip & Sketch it’s the same instructions.

  • Windows 7: Click Start (the round button in the very bottom left hand corner) and click in the search panel that appears. Start typing ‘snip’ and the tool should be listed. Click on the tool to open.
  • Windows 8.1: Swoosh your mouse into the very top right hand corner of the screen and pause for a bit. A panel will appear with various symbols – click on the magnifying glass. Start typing ‘snip’ and the tool should be listed. Click on the tool to open.
  • Windows 10: Click Start (the square-ish button in the very bottom left hand corner with a window on it) and click in the search panel that appears. Start typing ‘snip’ and the tool should be listed. Click on the tool to open.

 

Snipsketch1

Now you’ve found it, let’s see what it does.

  1. Click on New and the screen behind will go pale and your cursor is a crosshair.
  2. Click and drag to make a rectangle around what you want to take a picture of. As you drag, your Snipping Tool box disappears. As soon as you release your mouse, the Snipping Tool box reappears, complete with what you’ve ‘snipped’. It’s already copied to your computer’s memory, so skip to Step 5 if you don’t want to annotate it.
  3. To annotate, use the pen or highlighter (you won’t need to in the exam). As the pen is loaded on your cursor automatically, it’s easy to accidentally draw on it. Don’t worry – just use the Rubber tool on the far right of the little toolbar.
  4. Choose Copy (the little button with the two papers) – or, if you think your evidence isn’t good enough, go back to Step 1 to try again.
  5. Finish off what you were doing, if you need to (like clicking OK on a dialog box).
  6. Go to the location where you need to add your evidence.
  7. Make sure you’re somewhere like cell A1. The top left hand corner of your image will start in whichever cell is your active cell (that’s the one with the big thick border round it), so you want to be close to the top and the left – although it doesn’t matter too much, so long as your data is there.
  8. Click Paste, or
    Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+V, or
    Right-click and choose Paste.
  9. Close the Snipping Tool.

Snip & Sketch has exactly the same tools, but they’re laid out slightly differently.

So to summarise, that’s take a snip / finish task / paste.

Which to pick?

Between taking a screen print or Snipping, I don’t really have any preference. It really depends what mood I’m in. Here, to illustrate these blog posts, I’ve used a combination of both! But if you’re new to this, please do make sure you practise a bit, so you can do it without batting an eyelid.

However, do please bear the following things in mind!

  1. It has been pointed out (thank you, Helen H!) that doing a Print Screen without cropping can cause embarrassment if you have anything dodgy on your screen, such as non-work-related tabs open when you screen shot your web browser. Oops! Remember, keep professional!
  2. I personally couldn’t see a way to access the Snipping Tool when I was in the exam room. That’s not to say that others have been likewise prevented from using it, but just be aware that you need to practise both of these methods so if you find you can’t use the Snipping Tool, you’re not stuck.

If you’re following the suggested Learning Plan, please click here to go to the next post.

Setting up a spreadsheet for printing

A random fact: if you printed out an entire Excel worksheet (i.e. just one tab) without adjusting the width of the columns or the height of the rows, you’d need 76,355 reams of A4 paper.  Stacked, that’s nearly 4 kilometres tall!

What does this tell us? That we need to be very careful when printing from Excel or we may get more than we bargained for! Luckily Excel has some very good controls when it comes to printing, but it does mean you have to be on the ball before lackadaisically hitting Print.

Using Print Preview

Go to the File menu (or, for Office 2007 users, the Office button excel2007-home ) and choose Print, or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+P.

This will bring up your Print Preview, where you can scroll through the different pages and see how Excel is laying out your spreadsheet.

Things to consider:
  • Size – could you make your spreadsheet smaller to fit on one page (without compromising readability) or even slightly larger for a better visual effect?
  • Margins – could they be smaller or bigger?
  • Headers and footers – would it help to have these on your print-out?
  • Gridlines – would your print-out benefit from having the gridlines on it?
  • Orientation – portrait or landscape?
  • How much – do you really need to print out everything, or is it better to print out a portion?
  • Having rows repeat at the top of every print-out – would this make your print-out easier to read?

Once you’ve had a ponder alongside your preview, it’s time to go back to the spreadsheet and sort things out. This is done by clicking the arrow in the top left-hand corner of your screen, or by pressing Esc on the keyboard.

Whenever you do anything to do with printing, Excel will place dotted lines across your worksheet; these show how much will fit on each piece of paper and are called ‘page breaks’. You can’t get rid of them unless you close and reopen your spreadsheet – but to be honest, they’re not that intrusive so you just get used to them.

Using the print and view options

In older versions of Excel, print settings were scattered hither and thither throughout the program – now, they’re at least a little bit better gathered together, but there are still a few bits in different places, so we’ll start off by seeing what they are.

Moving between the views

Click on the View tab. This has three ‘views’ (ways the spreadsheet is displayed) which are important to printing out:

  1. Normal: the basic way your spreadsheets will look.
  2. Page Break Preview: a zoomed-out view which indicates where new pages will start.
  3. Page Layout: a view which allows you to see your spreadsheet with ‘paper’ behind, complete with the edges of the paper and the header/footer areas.

This is what they all look like. You can click on them and get larger versions to see.

1. Normal, showing the dotted lines to show the page breaks (you can only see the vertical one here)

2. Page Break Preview, zoomed out and showing blue lines instead of dotted lines for page breaks

3. Page Layout, showing the spreadsheet more like you’d see in Word, so you see the whole of the paper complete with Header and Footer areas.

They all look quite different, don’t they? They all behave exactly like normal spreadsheets, though – you can sort, make formulae, change the formatting and so on. Some people prefer one over the other; me, I will flip to Page Break Preview for certain tasks, but once I’m done, I’ll always return to Normal view. I really don’t get along with the Page Layout view, although I stress that’s just my personal preference.

The key thing here is knowing that if you open a spreadsheet created by someone else and they’ve left it in a view you don’t get on with – change it to what you do prefer!

The Page Layout tab

Not only do you have the View tab with its three views to change between, but you also have the Page Layout tab which gives you a wide range of choices for controlling printed output. Click on it and have a look at what it offers.

  • Margins, Orientation and Size are fairly obvious and easy to understand.
  • Print Area allows you to set a specific area to print out. (Practically, this is one of those things that really annoys users who don’t realise a Print Area has been set – and if you want to print out some titles, miss a bit, then print out something below, you’ll end up with your titles by themselves on one page and everything else on a separate piece of paper, unless you remember to Hide Rows.)
  • Breaks allows you to put in a manual page break, i.e. point at which it will move to printing out on the next page. (Practically, it only allows you to set horizontal breaks – not much use if you want to do vertical breaks! I always use Page Break Preview for this, to be honest, rather than the Breaks button.)
  • Background allows you to have an image behind your spreadsheet. (Practically, it’s virtually impossible to get the balance between an image that’s pale enough not to interfere with your data and dark enough to actually read!)
  • Print Titles is really handy, as it allows you to print your header row(s) or even certain columns onto every print-out.
  • Width and Height are to specify if you want a certain number of rows or columns to fit perfectly. I was just playing around with it and it shrank my spreadsheet to 11% (see Scale, below) – completely unreadable! So steady on with this one!
  • Scale will shrink or enlarge your spreadsheet to fit onto one piece of paper – so if you have a single column which falls off onto another page then you can set the scale downwards (say, to 80%).
  • Gridlines/Headings: view/print – if you take the tick out of your View box on these, you’ll see the gridlines and/or the bit with your column letters and row numbers disappear. Working without these can be a bit weird, so pop the ticks back in. Now, if you place a tick in the bottom two boxes (for Print), you’ll have the gridlines actually print out (handy!) and/or the column letters and row numbers too (unusual, but you never know). It’s worth doing the Gridlines tick on pretty much most printed spreadsheets, because adding borders manually actually can add a huge amount of bulk to your file size, which can make it slow to open, edit or make other changes.
Print Preview

Many of these options can be accessed from Print Preview as well.

Above, you can see you can change orientation from Portrait to Landscape, change the paper size, change the margins and change the scale. You can also click Page Setup right at the bottom, where you’ll access a dialog box with four tabs:

  • The first tab, Page, deals with the orientation, paper size and scaling.
  • The second tab, Margins, allows you to set specific margins, as well as to choose to have the printed spreadsheet centred on the page vertically or horizontally (it can look quite crisp, doing this).
  • The third tab, Header/Footer, is where you can apply your headers and footers.
  • The final tab, Sheet, deals with printing the same rows at the top of every page, printing gridlines, row/column headings, printing comments and printing errors.

As you can see, all of these options (bar printing comments/errors) are available from the Page Layout tab as well – with one important proviso: printing the same rows at the top of every page (see below for how) is NOT available via Print Preview.

Printing rows at the top of every printed-out page

Firstly, then, decide if you want to have certain rows appear at the top of every print-out. In this example, Row 1 has the headings Date, Place, and Country/Area. I have 447 rows, so it would be really useful to have Row 1 appear on every page. This is called Print Titles. From your Page Layout tab, click Print Titles.

This will bring up the Page Setup dialog box. Click in Rows to repeat at top.

Now, when you move your cursor over the worksheet, you will see a small black right-facing arrow. Click once for just Row 1, or click and drag over however many rows you need to have repeated at the top of each page.

Your Page Setup box will then say something like $1:$1 (for Row 1) or $1:$4 (for Rows 1 to 4). Click OK.

You can do the same for columns in the panel below as well, if you need.

You won’t see anything happen to your spreadsheet unless you’re in Page Layout view or in Print Preview. Have a look at Print Preview (because Page Layout view will remove your Freeze Panes) and scroll through to see this. Return to the spreadsheet when you’re done.

Note: you cannot access this from Print Preview, as of course you can’t click on the rows or columns.

Adding Headers or Footers

Your spreadsheet has three areas for a header, and three areas for a footer. There are essentially two ways of accessing it, both with two ways to find – I explain each one and its tools in detail over here.

Getting a good fit onto one page

I tend to go about this in a ham-fisted, messy way – so I’m hoping you’ll learn from my mistakes on this one! For instance, I’ll play around with the scale and page breaks, then realise I want to have a repeating header row on every print-out. Or, I’ll make all the margins crazy small, then decide I want a header or footer. All of this messes up my settings and I have to start again!

Change the orientation

Decide if you think your spreadsheet would work better as Portrait or Landscape .

Either click on Page Layout, Orientation, and set as preferred, keeping an eye on how the dotted lines indicating your page breaks are behaving, OR change this setting via Print Preview.

Check your column widths and row heights

Have a look at your columns – are they all fitting their contents perfectly? For instance, here I could probably get away with narrowing column A.

Now I’ve used Autofit on column A (by double-clicking on the boundary between A and B), you can now see that my dotted line to indicate the edge of the paper has jumped from being between B and C (meaning Country/Area would have fallen onto a new page) to being between C and D (meaning all three columns will print on the same sheet).

Shrinking or enlarging to fit better

It might be that you just have one skinny column at the end that just won’t seem to join the rest of your columns on the one page. You have a choice – you can either tweak the margins or change the scale.

Changing the Margins

This is best done in Print Preview. Look in the very bottom right-hand corner, just above your date and time – you’ll see a couple of small buttons. The one on the left allows you to see the margins on the preview. (The other one zooms out your preview and shows the whole page at once.)

Now you’ll see lines which go top-to-bottom and left-to-right – these show your margins. The pair at the top show the header area, and ditto at the bottom for the footer area.

You can either move your mouse over these vertical or horizontal lines, and drag up/down or left/right as required – this sets them manually – or you can use some of the presets from the Margins option on the left of your preview. I often use Narrow margins.

NOTE OF CAUTION: You can also change the width of your actual columns from here too. See the small black tags at the top of the preview that don’t join up from top to bottom? These are your column width adjusters, and if you change them you will be affecting your actual spreadsheet BUT you CAN’T UNDO if you mess it up! Eek!

Scaling

This can be done by using the Scale percentage button on the Page Layout tab. As you use the up and down buttons, pay attention to where your dotted line is. This will enable you to see exactly when your data fits neatly on one page.

Alternatively, you can use…

Page Break Preview

Switch to View, Page Break Preview. Don’t worry – I know it looks alarming, but it’s really handy to check where the pages start and end if you have different sections in your spreadsheet.

You might have numeric data showing up as a row of #### – don’t adjust, it’s just because it’s zoomed out so you can see the whole page.

Blue dotted lines indicate automatically placed page breaks. Solid blue lines indicate the outer edges of your printed output or manually placed page breaks. In the example here, I want each new year to start on a new page. So I move my cursor over the dotted blue line and drag up until it’s just above the section heading. Once I let go, the line is solid to show it’s manual.

You can use this for adjusting columns as well as rows. Sometimes, I’ve found that the fuzzy line that appears as I’m adjusting the page breaks doesn’t line up with what I want it to – it’s frustrating, but you can work around it if you know what it’s doing.

Don’t forget to return to your Normal view once you’re done – it can be very hard to actually work in this view!

Final touches

Each time I make a change, I have a quick peep at my Print Preview. I can see that it would be handy to have the gridlines printing out as well, so I select Page Layout tab, and put a tick in the Gridlines option.

As you can see from the below, the output is far more readable with the gridlines on.

The only snag is that the lines all add a slight extra bulk, so you may find you’ve now just had one solitary row or two pushed onto a new page – in which case, adjust your margins or page breaks as above. Can you see, for instance, how I have a very tiny page 8 here? In this case, I dragged the dotted line down to match the solid line at the top of page 9.

Printing only a portion of your data

This is known as Print Selection and can be very easy to set up.

  1. Start off by highlighting the area you want to have printed.
  2. Go to Print Preview.
  3. Now, under Settings, click the down arrow next to Print Active Sheets.
  4. Choose Print Selection.
  5. Check your preview on the right, and if you’re happy with it, click Print.

So that’s a more-or-less exhaustive trawl through all the print settings. As you can see, you have to jump around quite a bit to get it to do what you want – but getting a print-out correct, first time, without wasting sheets and sheets of paper, is well worth it indeed.

If you’re following the suggested Learning Plan, please click here to go to the next post.

Adding ‘comments’ and using Spell Check

Have you ever sent a spreadsheet to a client or colleague and then realised there’s a glaring spelling mistake?

Have you ever seen a little red triangle in the corner of a cell and wondered what it’s all about?

Then this post is for you!

Are you like, meh, I know all this already? Then this post is still for you, as I give a couple of pointers about spell checks and show you some really cool things to do with comments which few people seem to know about.

Spell-checking a spreadsheet

It’s basic. It doesn’t do a little red line underneath to warn you, either… but let’s face it, this program is all about the numbers, not the text.

To spell check, I use another keyboard shortcut: F7. (That works in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint as well, by the way!)

Alternatively, you can click the Review tab and Spelling is the very first button on the left hand side.

It’ll scan through, cell by cell, and pick up anything it thinks should be changed. When it finds a problem, it’ll list suggestions – you can choose to Ignore this one suggestion or Ignore All of them; or Change to this one suggestion or Change All identical errors to the same suggestion.

Important note 1:

Don’t just automatically accept the first choice on offer! Sometimes it’s not correct. In the example below, we’re talking car manufacturers, so the first option is wrong and I’d have to click on Renault before clicking on Change.

(Incidentally, this is why I think some people put ‘defiantly’ when they mean ‘definitely’. As ‘definate’ is a common misspelling of ‘definite’, when the spell check hits this word it will suggest ‘defiantly’ before ‘definitely’, as it can often list suggestions in alphabetical order. People merrily click Change without actually appraising what they’re amending! You’re in luck with this error, though, as Excel will change it automagically.)

Important note 2:

Excel will start its spell check from whatever cell you’re in (your active cell). This is fine if you’re in cell A1, but if you’re in, say, cell P32, it’ll start from there and when it gets to the end, it’ll ask you if you want to carry on from A1 back to P32:

Of course, if you have no data below P32 – say, it’s all in A1:G15 – this is the first thing you’ll see! It can really confuse people if they don’t know that’s the way it’s thinking!

Important note 3:

You can spell check more than one sheet. Select all your sheets (go here for a reminder) before you press F7 or go to Review, Spelling.

Adding comments (or ‘those little red triangles’)

A red triangle in the right corner of your cell means someone’s added a Comment. These are handy little things that can act as explanatory notes or reminders. When you point your mouse to the cell and pause a short while, the comment will appear and you can read it:

Add a comment

The easiest way is to right-click directly in the cell itself. From the menu, choose Insert comment.

Alternatively, go to the Review ribbon and click on New Comment, which does exactly the same thing.
You’ll get a small yellow box with your name in it – in the image above, it’s come up as Excel4AccountingStudents because that’s the account I’m using for my computer. You can actually amend this if you want – just click and drag over it and retype.

Type your comment, then click anywhere outside to close it.

Note: you can’t press Esc to quit out of a comment. I know some of you are as much in love with your keyboard shortcuts as I am, but I admit defeat on this. If you know how to do it – please let me know!

Change a comment

You can control various things about your comments from accessing the right-click menu in the cell containing the comment. Alternatively, click in the cell, then click Review, Edit Comment.

  • Edit does what it says on the tin: you can amend the text.
  • Delete is kind of obvious too, I hope!
  • Show/Hide means that you can have it permanently displayed, rather than popping up only when you hover over the cell.

I’d like you to have a bit of a play for a second: Right-click and choose Edit Comment (or pick Edit Comment from the Review ribbon).

Note that your comment now has little squares in all the corners and in the middle of each edge. Move over any of those squares and your cursor changes to a two-headed arrow. Click and drag outwards, and lo: your comment gets bigger! Yes, you can resize comments!

Now, move your cursor over the actual border. Your cursor changes to a four-headed arrow. Click and drag off to the right – you can see you’re now able to reposition your comment! It will always remain ‘anchored’ to the cell it was made in, by an arrow. When you click out, then go back to hover over it and display the comment, it will resort back to its original position. But, if you right-click and choose Show Comments, it will appear in the position you dragged it to, and be permanently displayed on your worksheet.

Change the colour of a comment

Oh yes, this is really a thing! Begone, boring yellow colour! Give me bright blue! Or orange!

  1. Right-click and choose Edit Comment (unless it’s being ‘shown’, in which case skip to the next step)
  2. Move your mouse carefully over the border until you get the four-headed arrow cursor
  3. Right-click at this point, and choose Format Comment.
  4. You get the Format Comment dialog box, which gives you the opportunities to fiddle around with the font, the size of the text, internal margins – all sorts!
  5. Click on Colors and Lines. At the top, you’ll see your boring old yellow colour. Click on the drop-down and choose any other that takes your fancy.
  6. Click OK, and your comment is now filled with that colour instead!


Honestly, this is so silly – but it blows people’s minds when you send them a spreadsheet with a differently-coloured comment in it!

Copy a comment to a new cell
  1. Choose Copy, whether you prefer
    Ctrl+C, or
    right-click/copy, or
    Home/Copy.
  2. Go to your destination cell.
  3. Right-click and click directly on Paste Special, or
    from the Home ribbon, click on the split below Paste, then Paste Special.
  4. From the dialog box that appears, click Comments, then OK. Your comment has been pasted.
Have a comment show when you print

This can be a very useful feature – and you can either have them pop up at the end, or overlaid on the print just as they would if you hovered over with your mouse.

  1. Either:
    Go to Print and click on Page Setup at the bottom, or
    Go to the Page Layout ribbon and click on the fly-out to access your Page Setup dialog box.
  2. Click on the Sheet tab
  3. Click next to Comments, and decide whether you would prefer to have them At end of sheet or As displayed on sheet.
  4. Go to your Print Preview and see the effect. Amend if preferred.

So there you have it – plenty of things can be done with Comments if you know how! I like them – I think they’re really useful.

If you want to have a go, download this spreadsheet and have a play.

If you’re following the suggested Learning Plan, please click here to go to the next post.