Yesterday, you learned about Print Areas – a time & paper saving feature of Excel. While print areas are great, you can only set up one print area per sheet. What if you want to print either report or data based on user selection?
In such cases, you can set up dynamic print areas.
That is right. See below demo to understand how it looks. Read on to learn how to set up dynamic print areas.
Set up dynamic print areas – tutorial:
- In your spreadsheet, select any range of cells and create a print area (click on the link for instructions).
- Now, identify the all ranges that may be printed. To keep it simple, let’s say there are 2 such ranges. Give them names like report and data.
- Set up a selection mechanism thru form controls so that user can pick what they want to print. Something like this:
Link the option buttons to a cell, say M8. - Go to Formulas ribbon tab and click on Name Manager.
- You can see the Print_Area named range, pointing to the range you originally selected.
- Edit the range and write a CHOOSE formula to return either report or data range based on M8 (form control) value. Like this:
=CHOOSE($M$8, report, data)
That is all. Your print area is now dynamic.
Download dynamic print areas demo workbook
Please click here to download dynamic print areas workbook. Examine the formula for Print_Area named range to understand better.
Other creative ways to use print areas:
- Your users can see something but print an alternative range (may be B/W compatible), with print areas.
- Your print areas can depend on latest date (for example, print coupon before expiry date and print alternative material after expiry)
- Your users can print reports at various levels – summary or detailed with dynamic print areas.
How are planning to use dynamic print areas?
How do you like this technique? Please tell me how you are planning to use dynamic print areas in your work. Post your comments below.
11 Responses to “Fix Incorrect Percentages with this Paste-Special Trick”
I've just taught yesterday to a colleague of mine how to convert amounts in local currency into another by pasting special the ROE.
great thing to know !!!
Chandoo - this is such a great trick and helps save time. If you don't use this shortcut, you have to take can create a formula where =(ref cell /100), copy that all the way down, covert it to a percentage and then copy/paste values to the original column. This does it all much faster. Nice job!
I was just asking peers yesterday if anyone know if an easy way to do this, I've been editing each cell and adding a % manually vs setting the cell to Percentage for months and just finally reached my wits end. What perfect timing! Thanks, great tip!
If it's just appearance you care about, another alternative is to use this custom number format:
0"%"
By adding the percent sign in quotes, it gets treated as text and won't do what you warned about here: "You can not just format the cells to % format either, excel shows 23 as 2300% then."
Dear Jon S. You are the reason I love the internet. 3 year old comments making my life easier.
Thank you.
Here is a quicker protocol.
Enter 10000% into the extra cell, copy this cell, select the range you need to convert to percentages, and use paste special > divide. Since the Paste > All option is selected, it not only divides by 10000% (i.e. 100), it also applies the % format to the cells being pasted on.
@Martin: That is another very good use of Divide / Multiply operations.
@Tony, @Jody: Thank you 🙂
@Jon S: Good one...
@Jon... now why didnt I think of that.. Excellent
Thank You so much. it is really helped me.
Big help...Thanks
Thanks. That really saved me a lot of time!
Is Show Formulas is turned on in the Formula Ribbon, it will stay in decimal form until that is turned off. Drove me batty for an hour until I just figured it out.