MS-Excel / Excel 2003

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Using the Page Break Preview feature

You can use the Page Break Preview feature to try and manually adjust the bad page breaks that you identify in the report. You can access Page Break Preview from either the normal worksheet window or the Print Preview window:

• From the normal worksheet: Choose View → Page Break Preview.
• From the Print Preview window: Click the Page Break Preview button on the toolbar located at the top of the window.

When you choose Page Break Preview, Excel displays the worksheet at a somewhat reduced magnification with the page breaks clearly identified in the worksheet window. Page borders appear as heavy blue dashed lines, and the page numbers appear in the middle of the page in light gray. The first time you choose Page Break Preview, Excel displays a Page Break Preview Welcome information dialog box, which informs you that you can adjust the page breaks displayed on the screen by dragging them.

After closing this dialog box, you can examine the page breaks (indicated by the dotted lines) by scrolling through the worksheet. Note that you can use the Zoom button on the Standard toolbar to reduce the magnification on the worksheet even further so that you can see all the pages and the order in which they will be printed (indicated by the page numbers displayed in the center of the page).

After examining the page breaks in the Page Break Preview display, you can then decide which page breaks, if any, to adjust. When deciding how to adjust page breaks, keep in mind that Excel won't allow you to drag the page breaks to include more columns to the right or more rows lower in the worksheet because these represent the limit of columns and rows that fit on the page, given the current page and printing settings. (To be able to include more of these columns or rows on a page, you'd have to adjust the margin settings, column widths, or the scaling of the printing.)

To manually adjust a page break in the Page Break Preview display, drag its page border to the column or row where you want the page to break. Note that Excel distinguishes the page breaks that you adjust in the Page Break Preview display from the ones that the program put in by displaying yours as blue solid lines (rather than blue dashed lines).

After you finish adjusting the bad page breaks in the Page Break Preview display, return to the normal worksheet display by choosing View → Normal.