Excel file printing forcing margins

Question

When I set my margins all to 0cm, and I have a portrait oriented page, the first top left cell in excel is like 2-3 mm from the top left corner of the page which is perfectly fine. However when I turn my page to landscape, suddenly there is quite a big gap (about 1 cm) and I cannot find a way to make it start at the edge of the page. I have a report which cannot be decreased in size. When exported to pdf, it prints fine, however when exported to excel it doesn't fit properly even though it is of the same size as in pdf. Is there a way to set that the excel would not add it's hidden margin when printing?

Answer 1

There are a number of things at play.

• Layout margins vs. print marginsThere are physical limits to the area a printer can actually print on. When you set layout margins, that is for appearance, but the margins must be at least what is required to keep the output within the physical print area of the printer.

• Different print margins for different printersEach printer can have different print margins. Outputting to PDF or printing to a PDF virtual printer doesn't impose a print margin because it is not a physical device. It is up to you to ensure that the layout margins are adequate for the printers that will eventually be used with the PDF.

• Landscape vs. portrait - printerMost printers do their actual printing in portrait (wide format printers allow you to actually feed the paper in landscape). On a regular printer, a landscape page is just mapped sideways onto a portrait page for printing purposes. The printer margins apply to the paper, not the document, so when you print a landscape page, the top and bottom non-print areas on the printed page are really the left and right non-print areas of the printer.

• Landscape vs portrait - ExcelIn Excel, the margin settings are not linked to the orientation setting (at least in the 2007 version; can't vouch for later versions). If you set the margins (or use default margins) for a portrait layout and then select landscape, the margins don't automatically reverse orientation. You must verify that the margins are appropriate for the orientation.

• Printer non-printing areaThe printer margin reflects the physical configuration of the printer. Most printers will map the print output to the paper and anything in the non-printing area will just be cut off. Some printers don't do a good job of that and the output will be offset on the page.

• Shrink to fitSome printer drivers provide a shrink to fit option, which reduces the output to fit within the print margins. Excel has a similar feature built into its layout functions. If you go into the page break view, it will show you where the page breaks will be based on current settings. You can manually move those margins to force more content on the page. Excel will shrink the content as necessary to fit.

To diagnose what's going on in your case, review all of those factors and settings. If you still can't determine what's causing the problem, edit your question to include what all of those settings are, and describe what happens to the output when you change specific settings.

Answer 2

Usually, there is a default setting for page size that comes from the printer setting, and normally the default page size is set to letter. You need to change that to A4.