Does anyone know if there is a way to change the default print margins for either mac or windows versions of office, so that files print out exactly the same on either OS? My new computer is a mac, but all my excel files were made with windows. I have thousands of excel files that won’t print out properly, and this is driving me nuts!!!
thousands of excel files???
That is a lot.
Yep. Thanks for your help…er, not.
I am sure someone else will have a better solution, but here are a few things that come to mind.
- If the data is static ish, you could print to adobe acrobat first. If it looks OK there, then it should be fine in either OS after that.
- Work out what adjustments you could make to a file to make it print ok in either OS. Then use a VB script to modify open, modify and save all the files you need adjusting.
- Maybe you can set up margin settings to override the xls settings?
maybe you can set the scale just once for many docs, but i doubt it. thds wold perhaps allow you to rpint a doc on one page that would otherwise want to print on two pages.
orifice is notorious for this kind of problem, which exists in all flavours of the suite: excel, word and poopoint. i think it stems from the totally different screen writeup methods in use in the two OSs. in a mac, the screen is written and documents are created in and printed in pdf format, so pdf on a mac is true wysiwyg. AFAIK, there are three different environments in the diferent areas of a windoze machine… screen draw, printing and actual files.
i may be wrong, tho. happy to be corrected by all you true genii out there.
I will check it out, thanks for the tips.
another tip: check your default paper size, which you can set to the curent one in MacOSX by holding down the option key as you select a paper size in the detailed page setup screen. you may have reverted to US letter rather than A4. page margins i think are controlled by each document’s internal settings. the scale thing has worked for me in the past.
of course, setting up a VB script is the bee’s knees for this kind of batch job… but then you have to battle with VB.
“and a big cold thirst needs a big cold beer. as a matter of fact, i could go one now.”
another thought.
Page setup can be at SHEET level, not workbook. What you may be able to do is create a duplcation of the Windows sheets and lable it OSX or something. Lock the cells in the new sheet so any data has to go into the original sheet.
On the second sheet, set the margins to be OSX friendly.
Now, whenever you update a workbook, just choose the appropriate sheet to print from. The data will be the same, but the layout will differ accordingly.