Autofit does not size properly for printing

B

Bob

When I AutoFit a column that contains more than one word, the column displays
as a single line of text in the workbook view but is not large enough to
display the text in a single line in Page Preview. In Page Preview sometimes
it cuts off the right edge of the text and sometimes it word wraps. This has
been occurring for several versions of Excel. What should I be doing that I
am not doing? What actually controls AutoFit widths? It appears from the
results that I am seeing that AutoFit does not use the correct letter widths
in determining the amout of space required for the text. Any help would be
greatly appreciated.
 
D

Dave Peterson

I think that WYSIWYG is an estimate at best.

The real test of how it looks on paper is looking at the printed output--and
widening the column (or shrinking the font).

Not much help, but you're not alone with the problem.
 
C

cradovsky

Three thoughts:

- One, you can manually push line-breaks into your cells at the wrap
points that make sense to you. Problem with this is you'd have to come
up with some arbitrary criteria for when to wrap (e.g., number of
characters, backing up to the beginning of a word, etc.). You'd likely
be conservative and break "early" on the line, therefore you'd have
extra whitespace between columns.

- Two, come up with a "fudge factor" that allows you to assess the
difference between the normal view and the print-preview view and apply
this to a row-height adjustment. Still not ideal, as things such as
font, bolding, word-length, etc. effect the wrapping in ways beyond the
straight factor adjustment.

- Three, find some VB environment object that lets you "peek" at the
print-preview version and adjust accordingly.

One and two are overly complex, and will always be an approximation
that will fail at the edge conditions. This could be minimized by
joining the two approaches, but that solution is too complex for easy
implementation/maintenance and will still fail occasionally.

I have yet to find the object in the VB environment that lets you
"decode", predict, or otherwise directly calculate the print-preview
version of a sheet. In the MS-Access environment, you can alter
appearences during run-time, but I haven't heard of that in Excel.

Without a resolution to this, Excel is a flawed tool for automated
reporting.

Regards,

Carlo
 
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