Any excel gurus?
 

I'm creating a master schedule for all the students on my caseload this year for school. It's a pretty big file, and I wanted to know how I can make it more printer friendly. I also wanted to write numerous lines in one block without making it way too big. Is this possible?

Any help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Hmm.

It sounds like either MS Access or MS Word would be better suited for your needs.

Damn big schools.

:evil:

Know software better than 18 year olds....

Seriously. Then no worries.

I'll try and help you if you can explain a little better what you are wanting.

In your print dialogue box you can set the printing percentage to reduce it down to fit on whatever page size you are using.

As for the word wrap, you should be able to select all, right click, select cell format and find the word wrap check box. It's probably clicked off, click it on and close the box. Then change your column widths to be more narrow. The type should wrap into several lines. I'm doing this from memory, so some of the terminology may be wrong.

Oh, and you can change to paper orientation and margins from "page setup" (I think).

Go to youtube.

Seriously.

There is a tutorial for everything you could think of for MS Office products. For me, at least, it is a lot easier to see how to do things and what the results are rather than trying to have someone explain it to me in a chat room.


Edit: And Dane is right; MS Access is the way to go. You can export to excel, generate reports, etc, etc. Access lets you sort the data whereas excel doesn't.

Not trying to be smart, but why worry about being printer friendly?

Most things sent home by Teachers these days are done on memory sticks...I haven't printed out a schedule for my kids in a couple of years. We have it downloaded to a calendar that pops up on the computer each morning..

I've seen a couple of people take calendars and put them on digital picture frames....

That said, Dane is probably right...if it is that big you could use either Access or Monarch.

mmaddog
*******

Thanks guys.

I was able to accomplish what I wanted.

I need it to be printer friendly because I have to give hard copies to the teachers the students work with. It is much easier for them than having to pull it up on a computer.

Access would be overkill for this. Word...maybe. But every schedule I've seen in my line of work is done in Excel.

Pivot Tables FTW!

That may be true but that doesn't mean that it's the most efficient.

Once the tables are created in Access, queries can be written to quickly do almost anything. And as FA pointed out, it's very easy to create reports based on those queries. You don't have to worry about expanding data and whether it fit on a page. You can create Keys and sort any which way.

MS Access databases offer infinite possibilities whereas Excel can be very, very limiting at times.

See above post. Pivot Tables FTW. It would take so long to set this up in access whereas pivot tables can work with large amounts of data easily and be done very quickly.

http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/en...ot-tables.aspx

Link for pivot tables and info.

I haven't figured out why pivot tables aren't included in Excel 101. They may seem a bit complicated, but I'd argue that they may be the single most useful feature in Excel when it comes to manipulating data.