Spreadsheet Received by Email Isn't Printing Properly

[RondaM_AIM]

Version: 2008 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Processor: Intel I have a coworker who has shared a spreadsheet she sent a great deal of time formatting with myself and a few others. When she views or prints it, the spreadsheet consist of 6 pages. When any of the recipients views the spreadsheet it consist of 12 pages, and if we print it consists of 14 pages. As near as I can tell all of her formatting holds, but for some reason the view is showing us the far right column on it's own page and the print is adding an extra page break for the 5, 6, 12, and 13 pages. In house this isn't a huge deal, but we're definitely not happy at the thought of clients getting the spreadsheet with the formatting off. Any guidance any one here could give would be most appreciated.

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

Version: 2008 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Processor: Intel
I have a coworker who has shared a spreadsheet she sent a great deal of
time formatting with myself and a few others. When she views or prints
it, the spreadsheet consist of 6 pages. When any of the recipients views
the spreadsheet it consist of 12 pages, and if we print it consists of
14 pages. As near as I can tell all of her formatting holds, but for
some reason the view is showing us the far right column on it's own page
and the print is adding an extra page break for the 5, 6, 12, and 13
pages. In house this isn't a huge deal, but we're definitely not happy
at the thought of clients getting the spreadsheet with the formatting
off. Any guidance any one here could give would be most appreciated.

In order to expect the formatting to print properly on another machine
you need to assure that that machine has the same fonts and printer
installed as the machine which created the format.

To get the pages to fit properly try changing margins and make sure
there is plenty of white space in the horizontal and vertical margins.

you'll just have to "play" with it on several machines until you are
satisfied that will appear and print properly.

 

[RondaM_AIM]

Thanks for the quick response Bob. I took your advise and played around and figured out if I used the coworker's machine and reduced the scaling down by just 1% point and resaved the document the recipients inhouse were able to open the document and have the view and print both look as they should (just 6 pages). My assumption is that this has something to do with the fact that each of us has a different model printer at our desk. The coworker is going to confirm with the client that the document is coming over formatted okay or make whatever scaling adjustment is optimum for the client.

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Ronda:

Whenever you see the phrase "Spent a great deal of time formatting..." then
be deeply suspicious

If it takes them longer than 10 minutes to format 12 pages, they're doing it
wrong

The originator should learn and study using styles, which enables her to
achieve total consistency throughout the entire workbook in a single click.

When formatting stuff to display "somewhere else" a rule of thumb is that
any item should be able to expand or contract by 10 per cent without
producing a noticeable change to the result.

The only exception to this would be if you were producing PDFs for
reproduction at a commercial printing works, where you would then find out
which printer driver and font versions the works is using, so you control
the variation to less than a tenth of a percent.

Hope this helps

Thanks for the quick response Bob. I took your advise and played around and
figured out if I used the coworker's machine and reduced the scaling down by
just 1% point and resaved the document the recipients inhouse were able to
open the document and have the view and print both look as they should (just 6
pages). My assumption is that this has something to do with the fact that
each of us has a different model printer at our desk. The coworker is going
to confirm with the client that the document is coming over formatted okay or
make whatever scaling adjustment is optimum for the client.

--

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matters unless I ask you to; or unless you intend to pay!

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410 | mailto:[email protected]