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When my clients get their financial projections, they tend to be very happy. Also, if they are coaching clients who did the projections themselves, proud. And then they find out that they need to distribute those financials, and that means printing them out, and then the romance ends. Because it’s not obvious how to print a spreadsheet in Excel in a useful way.
For the experts, that’s probably because Excel is mostly an on-screen tool: they fool around with sums in it, e-mail spreadsheets back and forth, and change each others’ figures. For the new-to-Excel, well, it’s a somewhat intimidating program (VLOOKUP anyone?) and, worse, the financial projections are themselves vastly intimidating.
As a result, most people spend very little time trying to print Excel spreadsheets. Until the day before their big investor meeting; then they need four perfect copies. This is how you get your perfect printouts of your Excel spreadsheet..
Here you see my standard pro forma income statement template.
At the top are 36 months of month-by-month data, below are the three year-by-year roll-ups. We want one page for each year, plus the three-year roll-ups all on one page.
First, go to Page Break Preview mode. In Page Setup – or on the Page Setup ribbon in recent versions of Excel – set the document to be 3 pages wide by 2 high, all landscape orientation. Now, drag the vertical dashed blue lines representing page breaks to after months 12 and 24. Drag the horizontal one below the 36-month projections.
Go to Page Setup. Set the A column – or wherever you put your row titles – to repeat on all pages. The months and years at the top will take care of themselves. Set it to print over, then down, so that the three years of monthly projections end up in order.
And print away. That’s all there is to it. You’ll end up with readable print-outs. (If there are too many rows to fit on one sheet vertically, try hiding unimportant ones. Just make sure you keep every line that totals up other lines, so that the financials make sense.)
At the top are 36 months of month-by-month data, below are the three year-by-year roll-ups. We want one page for each year, plus the three-year roll-ups all on one page.
First, go to Page Break Preview mode. In Page Setup – or on the Page Setup ribbon in recent versions of Excel – set the document to be 3 pages wide by 2 high, all landscape orientation. Now, drag the vertical dashed blue lines representing page breaks to after months 12 and 24. Drag the horizontal one below the 36-month projections.
Go to Page Setup. Set the A column – or wherever you put your row titles – to repeat on all pages. The months and years at the top will take care of themselves. Set it to print over, then down, so that the three years of monthly projections end up in order.
And print away. That’s all there is to it. You’ll end up with readable print-outs. (If there are too many rows to fit on one sheet vertically, try hiding unimportant ones. Just make sure you keep every line that totals up other lines, so that the financials make sense.)
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