Setting up printable page sizes

In this video we're going to take this very boring, plain old Excel spreadsheet, and turn it into this page sized boring Excel spreadsheet, just so that we can be using actual US letter sizes, or A4 sizes, we'll look at changing the measurements, the default inches to millimeters as well, getting ready to build our quote in this tutorial series, so let's go and do that now.

First up, let's create, this first option here, it says 'Blank workbook', and we get our kind of standard Excel layout. Now we want to change this to be more of a page layout, because we're going to be printing this, making PDFs, emailing it, that type of thing. So what we need to do is go along the top here to 'View', and switch along to this third option here called 'Page Layout'. You can toggle back to 'Normal' if you prefer, but 'Page Layout' is going to allow us to kind of get our page size, so there's no point using these cells that are already here, because they're not going to be able to print on one sheet.

The other thing to double check when we get started is the size of our page, and maybe these margins from the edges here. I'm based in Europe, so I'm going to use 'A4' or 'Letter'; I'll use 'Letter' because most of you, my students are based in the US, but let's go along to 'Page layout', and along here it says 'Size', we can switch this from 'A4' which is the default here, for me in Ireland, over to 'US Letter'.

The other thing we might do is, I've got mine set to inches, you might be setting yours to metric, you might want centimeters and millimeters, you do that over on 'File', down to 'Options', then you go to 'Advanced Options', and somewhere along here, scroll... there it is, 'Ruler units', yours might be set 'Default', so it will pick which country you're in, but say I do stuff for the US all the time, and for you, I have to switch between these two, you might switch it to 'Centimeters' or 'Millimeters'. I'm going to force mine to 'Inches'. Let's click 'OK'.

Next thing I want to do is, I'm still under 'Page Layout', I'm going to go to 'Margins', and I'm just going to make them a little bigger. I'm going to go to 'Wide', that just puts the edges away from-- bit of a space, margins between the edges of the page. This looks better, we don't have a lot of detail in a quote so we can kind of center in on the page a little bit more. Great!

So that's how to set up your page sizes, change the measurements, get your margins right, now we're going to go in the next video and look at adding images to our quote.