Forum Discussion
Print Preview Not Matching Original Document
So I know a lot of people have given suggestions on the Printer not printing out the same document but I have tried so many things and NOTHING has been working!
Anyway, my issue. I haven't printed anything but I have been working on an Excel sheet and when I look at the Print Preview, things within the document are moved. Black circles made are not where they are to be located, boxes enlarge and numbers aren't lined up. How do I fix this so the print preview and the original document line up? I have had to go back and forth, messing up the original document and making the Print preview match what I need. I will add pictures of what I mean. The first will be the original document, the second is the Print Preview.
Attached will be the document itself to see if you guys have the same issue or could figure it out. I sure hope so...two full days and multiple people have no idea what is happening.
wingsofElyon I had the same problem and then started searching for solutions, which led me to your post. I think I know what is going wrong and have managed to fix it on my side. The issues is that when you go into print break preview mode, it gives you the alignment lines in blue. You can adjust these and this is what I did to get the sizing to what I needed - but that is the problem. Excel is allowing you to change the print break lines and knows how to deal with the cells realignment when doing that, but it does not know how to fix that relative to the objects and images we lay over the cells. So it tried to stretch or squash the lines to compensate. I realigned the blue page breaks so that they fit a A4 aspect ration and made sure that both cells and objects / images where aligned in print preview. This worked for me and I managed to get it right.
Hope this helps.
- You can use the screenshot to convert the graphics into a bitmap, that could solve the specific problem for now. In the specific case it is not the best solution, but it could help in any case.
Nicolino
I know I don't know anything (Socrates) Hey, so I don't know if you've tried this yet (or if you've solved the problem already), but I did manage to come up with simple, but tedious, solution.
Personally, I keep my Excel spreadsheets in Page Layout mode if I'm planning to print them. That way I can see what's going to come out.
If you do this, you can keep an eye on the objects, and move them where you want them. But for a problem like yours, where you have so many small objects, you should also play around with the zoom feature on your spreadsheet. Move it up and down, and keep moving back and forth between the spreadsheet and the Print Preview until they match. From that point on, everything should work just fine.
I did a test of this and it worked at 140% zoom. I did also reduce the size of the bold circles. I think they might have been too big, which is why you also have that overlap problem.
wingsofElyon sorry I don't have a solution for you. But when I open your workbook the alignment isn't correct on my screen nor in print preview. I don't know how you are creating those circles but the non-bold circles appear to be some form of text code in the cell while the bold circles are shapes added on top of the sheet. If you want alignment, you might have better luck using all shapes (or all characters but guessing you couldn't do the bold that way and hence added the drawing objects) and maybe even group the shapes, but that is just a thought.
- mtarler thank you for your response and your thoughts. Unfortunately I don’t think that’s the case. I started a new document and just typed stuff in and the alignment is off also. All I did was merge some cells and type a list and the list is way off in print preview but aligned in the original. Again I appreciate your thoughts and hope others may have suggestions also.
wingsofElyon I also agree with mathetes that you are not using Excel in the way it is really designed (but then again I do that all the time) and that I would also suggest word or a typeset package like Publisher. I also agree with SergeiBaklan that non-monospaced fonts are going to cause more problems, but even with monospaced fonts the way a page is rendered it will render fonts different than images. So I go back to suggesting you might want to convert everything to objects that you specify the exact location for. You can probably get away with some text for headers and such that don't require specific alignment. Also, I didn't check what fonts you were using to create those circles and such, but you can also run into problems with font libraries that aren't truetype fonts because although the software may scale it one way the printer may step it differently. And you still have the issue that as you open it on different machines, they will be viewed differently (your sheet didn't view right on my computer) and not show right.
