EXCEL 97 Basics: Formatting, Saving and Printing

EXCEL 97: Formatting, Saving, Printing and Copying

A. Colin Cameron, Dept. of Economics, Univ. of Calif. - Davis

This September 1999 help sheet gives information on how to

format Excel spreadsheets
save Excel worksheets and workbooks
print Excel worksheets
print Excel charts
copy an Excel chart into another program
copy Excel worksheet contents to another program as data
copy Excel worksheet contents to another program as a picture

FORMATTING

Enter in the cars per household data discussed in Excel: Data Types and Data Input

   1    1

   2    2

   2    3

   2    4

   3    5

Suppose we wish to give the first series a long name. Insert a row to give

CARS PER HOUSEHOLD HH SIZE

   1    1

   2    2

   2    3

   2    4

   3    5

Then in Excel only the first part of CARS PER HOUSEHOLD will be displayed.
The cell width needs to be increased. This can be done in one of several ways.

Place the cursor between shaded areas A and B at the top of spreadsheet and double-click.
Place the cursor between shaded areas A and B, click and drag to the right to increase width.
Place the cursor within shaded area A, click to highlight the column, right click and choose column width and make it larger.
Place the cursor within shaded area A, click to highlight the column and chose Format | Cells.

Methods 3 and 4 can also be used to change other aspects of cell format.

SAVING WORKSHEETS AND WORKBOOKS

When you open up Excel it creates a workbook (the master document), which is composed of one or more worksheets.
You should save the workbook on your diskette with a name that identifies it as your class or project workbook, e.g. for economics 140 I might use a:e140cam, by choosing File / Save As.
You can save each class session and homework on a separate worksheet. When you first open the workbook it puts you in Sheet1. You can rename this to e.g. intro by double-clicking on the Sheet1 tab at the bottom of the screen and typing intro at the rename prompt. Sheet2 might become Ass2 etc.
Save results frequently.

PRINTING WORKSHEETS

To save paper always do a print preview first (File / preview).

For nicer output of a worksheet you can change the column widths if need be by moving the cursor to the vertical line that separates the column headers, e.g. between A and B.
This is discussed above under formatting.

For nicer output of a worksheet you can choose File | Page Setup and select the Fit to option.
For example if the output is just a bit over a page in print preview then select Fit to 1 page by 1 page.

PRINTING A CHART

For nicer output of charts that appear within the worksheet, move the mouse within the chart and click (this creates eight small square boxes around the chart). Then choose File | Print and the chart is printed on a separate page.

COPY A CHART

It is generally easy to copy individual charts to other software such as a word processor.

Highlight the individual chart by clicking within the chart and copy (CTRL-C)
Paste special into the software you are using.

Microsoft Office software such as Word may maintain the Excel format of the chart when you read it in, so that it can later be edited. Other software will instead save it as a picture, often as a WIndows meta-file (.wmf).

COPY WORKSHEET CONTENTS AS TEXT

This is particularly done to copy data from the spreadsheet into another program such as a word processor.

Highlight the area in the work-sheet to be copied and copy (CTRL-C).
Paste into the word processor (CTRL-V) or other software.

This will copy data across and insert it.
Interpretation of the data depends on what is copied across (e.g. data or chart) and the software it is copied to (e.g. word processor). As an example, if two columns of data are copied across they might be put into a two-column table in Word.

COPY WORKSHEET CONTENTS AS A PICTURE

Rather than print nicely formatted Excel output on paper we may wish to copy it into a word processor or web page. This output may include both the data and some charts. This is a little tricky and may perhaps be deferred to a time when you really have reason to do this.

Highlight the area in the work-sheet to be copied and copy (CTRL-C).
Paste-special into the word processor or other software (Edit | Paste Special).

Save the Microsoft Word file as a Word document, or for webpage publication as a webpage or html file.

The picture itself does not appear in the file that is saved. The file that is saved instead has a reference to the picture. The picture will be saved with a name such as image001.gif. It is better to give the this picture file a more meaningful name, but then you will also need to change the reference in the file that was saved.

If you have Adobe Acrobat Exchange (not just the reader) another way to digitally save the Excel output is to print the Excel file to a PDFWRITER which will save the file in pdf form. Other people can then read the output using a pdf viewer such as Adobe Acrobat reader.

For further information on how to use Excel go to
http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/cameron