Printing & exporting PDFs

In this video, we're going to look at printing our quote or invoice on to one page. And also, maybe creating a PDF that we can email to the client.

So printing's pretty easy. Just go to 'File, click on 'Print'. And pick your printer from this option here. Make sure the page size is correct, and hit the big old 'Print' button.

One thing you might find is that-- my preview's looking great, but often it can be split across two pages, and that just looks weird. So the first thing to check is that, our letter size down here, if you're in the US, you're using 'US Letter', if you're anywhere else, using maybe the 'A4' size. Just make sure that corresponds with back in here, under 'Page Layout', under 'Size', is what you're using in here.

So you might have opened up a template, and its set up to 'Letter', but you're trying to print on A4 and things aren't lining up perfect. So just make sure those two match up.

Another thing you can do to make sure everything lines up is to set your print area. You can select all of the cells, everything that's on your page that you want to print, and coming down here. This is everything on this page here. If you can't see it in this format, go up to 'Home', then go to 'View', and it will be on 'Page Layout'. Then you got to figure out what's going to go on your page. Then go to 'Page Layout', and this option here that says 'Print Area'.

So 'Print Area', then say 'Set Print Area', that's just telling Excel this is the stuff I want printed, none of those extra junk that I have lying around, just this stuff. Then when you go to 'File', 'Print', often, it will be on one page.

Next up is to make a PDF that we can email out, or send to someone another way. You can do it-- there's a hundred different ways in Excel, it turns out.

Under 'Print', you might have a PDF printer, like I've got. I can do it that way. I can go to 'Save As' and I can go to this drop down here, and there's a PDF there. I can go to 'Share', and I can go to 'email', and say 'Send as a PDF'. It's going to generate the PDF, add another step by dumping it into your Outlook, an email system. If you're using Outlook, this is really handy. I don't, I use gmail, so I have to make a PDF and then I have to make a PDF and then send it out separately or attach it separately using gmail.

You might have noticed, on my one I've got a few extra options that you might not have. See this one, 'Send as PDF', it's this one, right? But I've used the word Adobe in here. It's because I've also got something installed called Adobe Document Cloud, I think they call it. Acrobat Reader, or I've got Acrobat Professional installed. It just adds a few little extras to this.

So I could use that one, you probably don't have them though. And that's a little extra one as well you probably don't have. This is a little extra one you probably don't have. So loads of extra PDFs, but don't worry, you've got more too.

Let's go to 'Export'. And we can go to this one here, the one you probably have. 'Create PDF'. We can generate this one here. All roads lead to here. We've got a PDF, we're going to give it a name. The next invoice is going to be '100'. And that's it. I'm going to open mine up after publishing. I'm going to hit 'Publish'. Probably it's going to open up in whatever your default reader is. It's probably going to be

Acrobat Reader, hopefully.

There you go, I've got it. I can go and find it on my 'Desktop' somewhere. And I can attach it to my mail, there he is there. Great.

So that is how to print, and how to make a PDF. If you're having problems, drop me a line in the comments, the questions, because sometimes it's a bit of pain getting these things all to line up on print properly.

I will see you in the next video.