Print on large format paper 1

[Ralph2]

I want to print a small spread sheet on large ANSI D size paper. This spread sheet will be posted on a wall and I need room to write in some of the cells... and have an audience be able to read it.

For a simplified example.. consider one cell with one word (Welcome)in it.. now I want to print this and fill a ANSI size of paper with this one word.

At some point in the page setup there is an option to scale. It seems the maximum is 400% but this is not enough for my needs and does not fill the page.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I might find something similar to "expand to page".

I expect that one round-about way to do this would be.. in my example... use the largest size of text available (72 point ?) and then scale it to a maximum... This would mess up the rest of the spread sheet which is "normal" and needs to stay that way so I would prefer not to go that route.

The other way would be to make my "sign" with a program like AutoCad or Solidworks... but then the secretary who is making this spread sheet would be out of the loop for changes etc..

Thanks for any thoughts

Ralph

 

[davidbeach]

Make a PDF of the spreadsheet. Then print that PDF to your large format paper, Acrobat reader has an option to expand to fill the page.

 

[MintJulep]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3563/microsoft_excel_revolutionary_3d_.php

 

[handleman]

Alternately, if you don't have a way to create a PDF you can use the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer. Just print as you normally would, but choose the Image Writer as the printer. It will output a .TIF file that you can then print to whatever size you want. If you don't have software installed that will handle TIFF images, you can use IrfanView. It's freeware.

-handleman, CSWP (The new, easy test)

 

[handleman]

By the way, MJ, while the link you provided is fascinating, how does it relate to printing spreadsheets at a blown-up size?

-handleman, CSWP (The new, easy test)

 

[MintJulep]

Handleman,

Each cell is a pixel...

It doesn't really address the original question - although it does present an alternate for something simple like a "Welcome" page.

 

[Ralph2]

Thanks for all the thoughts.. I suspect by using the PDF approach the text will get very pixalated. We do this frequently with PDF drawings and find this to be a problem. Similar problems will likely occur by printing a tiff file. These are all esentially raster images and do not expand very well.

 

[geekEE]

You should try the PDF approach. It doesn't save all text as a bitmap. It depends on the source and the program that's used for creating the PDF. If your text is something common like Arial or Times New Roman, I think you'll find that it saves the Postscript representation in the PDF file.

Glenn

 

[jghrist]

You could increase the size of the font, the row heights, and column widths with the Format command so that it is a readable size on ANSI D, then print to the plotter.

 

[DonPhillips]

I use CAD to copy and paste the spreadsheet into a drawing (paperspace normally) and then I can plot it to whatever size paper I need.


Don Phillips

http://worthingtonengineering.com

 

[Ralph2]

Thanks again all.. Will try DonPhillips idea of pasting the spread sheet into AutoCad, see how that works

 

[davidbeach]

All the different PDF print drivers I have used create vector information not bit map information. Comparing this to drawings scanned into PDF format is truly an apples to oranges comparison.

 

[Onda]

If you type in the text size box a number bigger then 72, you will have your text write in that dimension. I think the max character size that excel support is 409!!

if you want to keep the other part of your spreadsheet in normal dimension you can create a 'mirror sheet' formatted big.
as an example:
if you have relevant information in Sheet1!A110
just type in sheet2 A1: =sheet1!a1
in sheet2 A2: =sheet1!a2
in sheet2 b1: =sheet2!b1
and so on
then you could format the sheet2 for big print and keep the sheet1 standard.
Maybe this can help!

Onda