Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated December 11, 2021)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021
It is easy to amass quite a bit of information in an Excel workbook. Fortunately, that information can be easily printed out. What if you only want to print just what you see on the screen, however, instead of an entire worksheet? To make matters worse, what if you are using frozen panes to hold the position of your page headers?
Normally, you could simply choose what you want printed and then just print that selection. Alternately, you could choose what you want printed, define it as the print area, and then choose to print. This simple of an approach won't work in this instance, however, because of using frozen panes. This feature allows you to "freeze" rows at the top of the screen, columns at the left of the screen, and only scroll the cells in the unfrozen part. Thus, you can't select everything you want to print because what you want to print consists of three distinct areas of the worksheet.
The solution is to set Excel's repeating rows and columns, and then choose what you want to print. The following steps work just fine:
Figure 1. The Sheet tab of the Page Setup dialog box.
What you do at this point depends on whether you are using Excel 2007 or a later version. If you are using Excel 2007, follow these steps:
Figure 2. The Print dialog box.
If you are using Excel 2010 or a later version, follow these steps instead:
The printout contains only the cells you specified, along with the frozen rows and columns. If you selected just the visible cells in step 9, then you effectively printed just the visible data.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (10816) 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: Printing Just the Visible Data.
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