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So some business wonk needs a spreadsheet printed in color on 11x17
paper and that means I'm gonna be involved because I control the only
printer capable of that and damned if I'm gonna let just anybody access it.
Well, it's a lot of columns and when it gets squeezed down to fit the
type is kinda tiny, so the idea is to resize the columns as narrow as
possible to minimize the shrinkage. Okay, Excel provides a simple trick
for this. Just click on the boundary between column letters and the
column auto-resizes to the minimum needed. Fine.
But when I print the sheet, there are fat margins in the columns, and
clearly they could have been narrower. Hmmm. Well, it turns out that
Excel is mostly concerned with the GDI and sizes the columns based on
the screen rendering of the fonts, not the printer width of the fonts.
So I bumped up the zoom to 100% (which, after some testing, turned out
to be the optimal size), clicked all the columns again, and they got
much narrower. When I reprinted the sheet, there was much less wasted space.
Just something to store in the back of your head for the next time you
need to print something from Excel.
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