Another approach to printing begins with the idea that you'd like to get a preview of what your printout is going to look like. In the status bar, the three buttons in the lower right-hand corner include a button called Page Break Preview. And as we click this, the screen changes and we see blue borders and possibly dotted lines as well. If you start to scroll in this list, as I'm doing here, recognize the watermark depiction here of Page 1, over in the left-hand side--up to the right in this example it's Page 18. So as we scroll up and down here, we see these. Now, with Page Break Preview, you have the option here of controlling not only the breaks, but the actual borders here.

It's good to get an actual preview here. If you do have available in your Quick Access Toolbar, the Print Preview button, we added this in an earlier movie, you can click that or possibly press Ctrl+F2 or maybe even go to the File tab and choose Print. Any of those three ways gives us the Print Preview. And as we look at this list here and then use the outer scrollbar on the right-hand side, scroll down, see how many pages it is, 34 pages. If you click in the list and start to scroll up and down, you might see breakpoints.

You might see the data about to be printed in a way that you wouldn't necessarily want. So what do we do in the situation like this? Let's escape from here and take advantage of the fact that as we're viewing Page Break Preview, first thought might be, do we really want to see columns K and L? They are empty except for the top two cells, so let's drag the blue border inward. Put the mouse right on there, hold down the left mouse button, drag it to there. Now, if we don't want to see these last two columns on separate sheets, we could take the dotted line and drag it rightward.

But that means that the data is going to be squeezed onto the page which may or may not be acceptable. It might be in this case, so let's jump into our preview again either with Ctrl+F2 or possibly the Print Preview button. As we look at the data now, it certainly looks more crowded. What might be appropriate at this point is simply to print one page. You do have the options here, when printing you could just say print page 1 to page 1 and do that and see what this looks like. And you'll have to be the judge as to whether this is acceptable.

If it's only for you, perhaps, that's just fine; if you got a different audience, maybe that's too crowded, it depends. Another option here could be to jump into Custom Margins over on the left-hand side and use Narrow Margins, in other words, less white space on the perimeter. So you can certainly make that choice. It looks like that pretty much just shifts the data leftward, it doesn't do much else. So, maybe that option isn't one worth considering, but you do have some choices here as you consider how this is likely to look when you print. Let's escape from here, Escape key, go back to our data and here's another potential option too.

And this is outside the realm of printing, but it does bring out the idea that you're in-charge of how you want this to look. Do you really want to see the Salary in this list? Do you want to see the Status? Well, you are the judge, but if we were to hide a column, I'm going to hide the Salary column simply by right- clicking it and choosing hide. How's the Print Preview looking now? Perhaps, not as crowded. And so sometimes you will use that approach to adjusting your display. Here's another thought too, as we scroll up and down, sometimes the breakpoints on the pages, we might want to be different.

Now, in this case, I can't make a strong case for saying change this, but we do have the ability to change the location of some of the page breaks. And you can imagine how in certain cases here, how appropriate or inappropriate this might be to adjust these breaks. So, maybe at some point here--I'll just pick an example of one of these here where there's a breakpoint that I might want to change-- I'll just drag that blue line elsewhere--so maybe in this case here. Now, that might be crowding one of the sheets, but I want the breakpoint to appear right here after Marketing. In other words, you can override the standard setting.

Jump into preview here. Let's take a look at this and we'll scroll down relatively quickly and try and find that breakpoint and there it is. Looks like one of the pages was quite a bit shorter. Again, you'll just have to decide whether that's acceptable or not when you print this data. Once again escape. So you do have control over that too. I'm going to press Ctrl+Z to undo that break because as it turns out, it wasn't maybe the best choice; but you do have control over those as well. Using Page Break Preview doesn't get us into some of the other printing issues, but it does give us a quick read on the data and allows us to choose the data that we want to use when we print our work.

And that button in the lower right-hand corner, Page Break Preview does allow us to continue working with the data. Now, most people probably don't want to work with their data in this view, but we can write formulas, we can insert data, we can do other things, just as if we were in the Normal view. So you can leave it in this view as much as you wish and when you're finished-- and for example you find this obtrusive-- simply click back on Normal. But Page Break Preview does give us a quick way to view our data just before printing.