6.5 Setup a printable package - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v Instructor>In addition to the electronic distribution</v> of our models, quite often, we will require to generate physical copies to summarize the included analysis and results. In such scenarios, we will typically bundle our input data, some of the data preparation steps and our final reports or dashboards with the accompanying notes as part of the standard print package for our model. For physical copies, we typically award the info and format sheets, release notes, source and reference data and any other detailed calculations or schedules we might have prepared to assist with our model outputs. During the sub lesson we will review some options to prepare the content within our model for such print packages. Once again, we'll use the report budget sheet from lesson four for this exercise. Now, most of the options we will discuss here are available on the page layout tab of our ribbon bar. Starting from the left, we have some options to configure the colors, fonts, effects, or the entire themes for our model. These options update the standard fonts and color palettes we use throughout Excel. For example, by selecting a different color palette here we can change the look and feel of our dashboard with a single click. This can be extremely useful when reusing content for different clients. Next for the page setup group we can either configure specific options for this worksheet from the ribbon bar, or launch the pate setup dialogue using the pop-up button at the bottom right of this group. Here under the page tab, we have some options to modify the orientation, scaling and paper size for this worksheet. In our case, we would like to have a landscape layout for this dashboard and print it on two pages with a single page width. On the margins tab, we'll update the desired spacing around our content to two, and set the values for header and footer to one. We will also center the content horizontally on our page. Moving on to the header and footer section. We will first create a custom header and use an online icon for our left section. We'll filter for small icons. Select one and insert, and then add the header for this page. Format the text. And also format the image to 50% of its original height and width. In Excel, we can use watermarks for printouts by providing a photo for the center section of our header. So in this case, we'll use a graft watermark, and then format it to be 150% of its original height and width. For the right section, we'll add some page counts and then click, okay. Next we'll configure the custom footer and supply the file name for the left section. At this point let's preview our printout for the sheet. As you can see, our content is still not center. This is probably because our print areas have not been configured correctly. We can do that on the sheet tab, of our page setup dialog. Once on this tab, we can click on the print area input box and then highlight the cells we wanna print. In addition to the print area, on this tab we have some other options for print titles which are rows and columns. We wanna repeat on every page of our printout, toggles for printing guidelines, comments, notes, errors, row and column headings, and so on. And then finally the page order for splitting content across multiple pages. The options to print comments, notes, row and column headings are quite useful when printing content like formulas for review. Now, going back to our worksheet, we can select equal width for the columns around our content. And then confirm the print preview by using the Control plus P keyboard shortcut. Our content is now centered horizontally. We will also adjust some of the custom margins here to provide more coverage on the page. Going back to our worksheet, I like to highlight a couple of other views that are extremely useful when preparing our content for printing. So we go under the view tab and then first select the page layout view which can be used to review how our printed document will look. So it'll include the headers and footers and the overall page layout including the page breaks. To review or modify where page breaks will occur in our content, it is best to use the page break preview. Here, not only can we review a paginated view for our report but we can also modify the page breaks for our content with these. Furthermore when dealing with objects like charts on our worksheets we can selectively enable or disable their printing by selecting a chart, right clicking and going to format chart area, then navigating to the size and properties tab, expanding the properties section, and then modifying the print object option. If I were to now use the Control plus P keyboard shortcut, we can confirm that our report has been broken down into two pages and also the chart that we just disabled for printing does not show on the preview. Our report is now ready for printing and we can use this screen to configure some final settings for the content we need to print which can be active sheets, in case we wanna print a package, the entire workbook, or a selection. We can also specify a page range to print from the preview on the right. Next, we can specify single-side or double-side printing and some other options for collation, orientation, paper size, margins, and custom scaling. Upon confirming all these options, we can select the printer that we wanna print this package to and then click print. Okay, so with that we have now covered the options to prepare our models for printing and configuring our print options to achieve the desired results. You should now be able to configure the print packages for your models as per your client's needs.