Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Repeating Rows at the Bottom of a Page.
Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated July 17, 2021)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021
Through the Sheet tab of the Page Setup dialog box (display the Page Layout tab of the ribbon and click the small icon at the lower-right of the Sheet Options group), Excel allows you to specify rows to repeat at the top of a printout or columns to repeat at the left of a printout. There is no way to specify rows to repeat at the bottom of a printout.
If you need rows at the bottom of each page in a printout, there are a couple of workarounds you can try. First, you can create a custom footer that contains static information. (How you create custom headers and footers has been discussed in other issues of ExcelTips.) There are, of course, drawbacks to this approach—you cannot easily line up footer information with columns in the worksheet, you cannot change the margins of the footer, and the footer cannot be any longer than 255 total characters. For simple needs, however, the footer is an easy solution.
Another workaround is to manually insert the static rows in the worksheet itself. Use the Page Break Preview mode of Excel to see where pages will break, and then insert the desired rows just before each page break. This, of course, may play havoc with some of your formulas, and it makes maintaining your worksheet more difficult than it would otherwise be.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (10204) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Repeating Rows at the Bottom of a Page.
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2021-07-17 13:39:09
Craig Markey
A solution that inserts a true repeating row at the bottom that stands alone independently of worksheet content: use Lotus 123 with its “WYSIWYG” (“what you see is what you get”) add-in, circa 1995, that includes exactly that function.
Oh, and if you want to print a single page containing content extracted from two different sheets in a workbook, Quattro Pro from that same era will do that.
One final thought: Consider the parable of Steve Jobs exhorting a programmer to shave seconds off of boot-up time, pointing out that the seconds/minutes saved by each user, multiplied by millions of users, added up to the equivalent of saving a life. Then consider the opposite: the aggregate time spent needlessly by millions (billions?) of users “relearning” Excel and Word because of gratuitous changes to the interface that add no value and slow the user down (even after the relearning has been accomplished). And in a couple instances even LOSS of functionality. Does that make Microsoft the equivalent of a gang of murderers?
Got a version of Excel that uses the ribbon interface (Excel 2007 or later)? This site is for you! If you use an earlier version of Excel, visit our ExcelTips site focusing on the menu interface.
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Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here:
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