Have you ever jumped back to normal view from print preview and noticed the annoying page break lines? They look distracting. They are like a naughty kid shouting for attention. look at me!!!
How do we get rid of those lines after completing our business with print preview?!?
Very simple. We just copy everything, press CTRL+C and then paste in a new workbook!
Of course, I am kidding. There is a better way.
You can click on Office button > Excel Options > Advanced > Scroll down to “Display options for this…” and then un-check Show Page Breaks option.
Aah, it would be much more simple to take a flight, go to Colombia, visit a coffee estate, gather beans, bring them back home, roast and ground them and make a coffee.
But then, we are not after Coffee. We are after those nasty print preview lines.
So here is a much simpler option to get rid of them, on click of button.
We just write a macro.
- Press ALT+F11 in your workbook to go to Visual Basic Editor (VBE).
- Now, locate Personal macros workbook in the project explorer. Just open the macros module (or insert a new one). [more on this here]
- Write a single line macro like this:
Sub disablePageBreaks()
ActiveSheet.DisplayPageBreaks = False
End Sub - Save your personal macros workbook.
- Come back to Excel (ALT+F11 again).
- Add this macro as a button to Quick Access Toolbar
- Now, you can just press the QAT button or use the relevant ALT shortcut (for eg. if the macro button is 4th one in QAT, you can just press ALT+4 to run it).
That is all. Now with all the saved time, you can go to Colombia for a cup of coffee. Make sure you bring me a kilo of that Juan Valdez beans.
More on Printing:
If you like to print and hurt a few trees, make sure you have read these.
8 Responses to “Introducing PHD Sparkline Maker – Dead Simple way to Create Excel Sparklines”
This looks like it could be very useful for a project I'm putting together right now, thank you so much. Quick & silly question, how do I copy & paste the sparkline as a picture?
Question answered. For anyone else:
Select chart>Hold Shift key & select Edit/Copy Picture>Paste
[...] more information about PHD Sparkline Maker, please read this article and to learn more about Sparklines, read this article from Microsoft Excel 2010 blog. Also there [...]
Am I right in thinking that the y-axis is set automatically by excel?
That makes it possible to get the column chart not to start at zero.
Andy - yes, it is currently set to 'auto', which defaults to a zero base for positive values, but you can change that by left-clicking the chart, then choosing (in Excel 2007):
"Chart Tools/Layout/Axes/Primary Vertical Axis/More Primary Vertical Axis Options"
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: When manually editing a chart's minimum/maximum axis values, PLEASE be sure there's a valid reason and that doing so won't skew the message shown by the data (e.g. by exaggerating differences). If in doubt, go back and read Tufte. (W.W.T.D.?)
[...] gridlines, axis, legend, titles, labels etc.) and resize it so that it fits nicely in a cell [example]. This is the easiest and cleanest way to get sparklines in earlier versions of excel. However this [...]
thanks for the work creating the template!!!!
looks good