Dan has an unusually wide spreadsheet where the page breaks suddenly disappear. This is a decade old problem and as soon as I heard the question, I remembered beating my head against my desk when this started happening to me back in the mid-90s. Episode 460 will take a look at what causes the problem and how it can be solved.
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 277 tips from the book!
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 277 tips from the book!
Transcript of the video:
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
I'm Bill Jelen.
Today we have a question sent in by Dan.
If you have a question, please feel free to email it or leave a message on the voicemail.
We'll get to you on a future podcast.
Dan has the spreadsheet that is very very wide.
And he says that his page breaks have quit working.
Now, let's take a look at this.
Usually, to insert a page break you'll go to column A, first row of the new page and use insert Page break and excel will draw a dotted line in there to indicate.
That is the area for the page break.
Dan because his worksheet is very wide went to file> Page setup and said that he wants to fit to one page wide by one page tall.
And all of a sudden now, the page breaks have disappeared.
We take a look at Print Preview.
It's ignoring the page breaks.
It seems that as soon as you turn on fit to one page wide by one page tall, we can't force any page breaks.
In the solution to this is to go back to file page setup.
You'll notice that after we've done a print preview, this adjust to value, which used to be a hundred percent and is not even turned on.
Is now Thirty five percent.
That's Excel's way of telling you that thirty five percent is the right way, in order to make this worksheet fit to the page.
So, after doing a print preview we could Click to adjust to click OK.
and now our manual page breaks turn back on.
One other solution that may or may not work in your situation is if you go to file page setup, instead we want to fit to one page wide.
But, we turn off the number of Pages tall.
So, now there's it can be as many pages as it needs to be.
Now click OK and The page breaks still appear now.
Some people I know they don't like the page breaks showing up at all.
You can actually go to Tools>Options.
And on the view tab so that you do not want to see page breaks, uncheck that option.
Click Ok.
And no matter what your settings are.
The page breaks won't show up in the document.
Hey, thanks for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
I'm Bill Jelen.
Today we have a question sent in by Dan.
If you have a question, please feel free to email it or leave a message on the voicemail.
We'll get to you on a future podcast.
Dan has the spreadsheet that is very very wide.
And he says that his page breaks have quit working.
Now, let's take a look at this.
Usually, to insert a page break you'll go to column A, first row of the new page and use insert Page break and excel will draw a dotted line in there to indicate.
That is the area for the page break.
Dan because his worksheet is very wide went to file> Page setup and said that he wants to fit to one page wide by one page tall.
And all of a sudden now, the page breaks have disappeared.
We take a look at Print Preview.
It's ignoring the page breaks.
It seems that as soon as you turn on fit to one page wide by one page tall, we can't force any page breaks.
In the solution to this is to go back to file page setup.
You'll notice that after we've done a print preview, this adjust to value, which used to be a hundred percent and is not even turned on.
Is now Thirty five percent.
That's Excel's way of telling you that thirty five percent is the right way, in order to make this worksheet fit to the page.
So, after doing a print preview we could Click to adjust to click OK.
and now our manual page breaks turn back on.
One other solution that may or may not work in your situation is if you go to file page setup, instead we want to fit to one page wide.
But, we turn off the number of Pages tall.
So, now there's it can be as many pages as it needs to be.
Now click OK and The page breaks still appear now.
Some people I know they don't like the page breaks showing up at all.
You can actually go to Tools>Options.
And on the view tab so that you do not want to see page breaks, uncheck that option.
Click Ok.
And no matter what your settings are.
The page breaks won't show up in the document.
Hey, thanks for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
