Printing spreadsheets

Printing from a spreadsheet has always been troublesome. In fact, if it was possible to represent large amounts of tabular data into nice little pages, chances are that spreadsheets would have become extinct by now. LeanPrint bridges this gap—intelligently.

Microsoft Excel's Print Areas and Fit to Page only work up to an extent. LeanPrint intelligently analyses your spreadsheets, and optimally arranges the data on pages, ensuring that readability is not compromised.

LeanPrint analyses the document structure and based on the complexity, applies transformations to create a print-optimized layout. LeanPrint lets you specify what to print, and you can optimize a worksheet, selection, or the entire workbook for printing. If your document has print areas specified, only the content inside the print area is optimized for printing.

You can use LeanPrint in two modes: Super Saver and Toner Saver. In the Super Saver mode both paper and toner are saved. LeanPrint output has reduced whitespaces and relaid out content. Whitespace outside the content envelope is removed, and whitespace between content blocks is shrunk.

Sometimes, it might not be possible to save paper: for example, in a single page document. In such cases, Super Saver mode defaults to the Toner Saver mode.

Super Saver

To save paper, LeanPrint optimizes paper usage by reducing white spaces, and lays out the content optimally.

Reduce whitespace

LeanPrint reduces white spaces by using the following strategies, wherever possible:

• Reduce page margins.

• Remove empty rows and columns that lie outside the data envelope.

• Remove empty rows and columns between tables or objects.

• Wrap long text in cells.

Relayout content

After eliminating extraneous white space, LeanPrint re-composes the page to optimize page usage.

• Select optimum page orientation and scaling percentage.

• Scale worksheet for best fit.

• Scale objects for optimum placement.

• Reduce text size; extra-large text is reduced.

Toner Saver

In the Toner Saver mode, there are no changes to the layout, and the number of pages is the same as the original document. Adjustments to reduce toner consumption are applied. For example, the output has thinner, gray borders, background fills are removed. Toner Saver can be run with gray scale and color options.

When the color intensity is set to light in the grayscale mode, chart fills are replaced by patterns, while all other fills are removed.

In the color mode fills are not removed. All colors in the spreadsheet are retained, but lightened to reduce toner consumption.

Additionally, you can also adjust the color intensity of the output. See Adjust the preview.

Examples

A few examples to showcase how LeanPrint works with Microsoft Excel files.