A spreadsheet lives on screen; its conclusions live on paper. RixSheets carries a full set of print and page layout controls — headers and footers, print areas, orientation and scaling — so the report you email or hand over looks like a report, not a screenshot of a grid. Beyond printing, the sheet exports to PDF and HTML, and captures full-page screenshots for everything in between.
Set the page up first
Page layout decisions shape everything else, so start there:
- Open the page layout controls for the sheet.
- Choose orientation — landscape for wide tables, portrait for lists and summaries.
- Adjust scaling so the table fills the page without shrinking into illegibility.
- Set margins to match the binding or the envelope it will ship in.
Wide tables almost always want landscape plus a scale tweak. If three columns are spilling onto a second page, tightening margins or nudging scale usually rescues the layout without touching the data.
When a table genuinely cannot fit one page across, decide deliberately where it breaks instead of letting the printer decide: repeat the header rows on each page so every page stays self-explanatory, and check the preview for orphaned columns — a single lonely column on page three is the classic sign nobody previewed. These few minutes in the preview are the difference between a report that reads well in a meeting and one that gets passed around upside down.
Headers, footers and print areas
The header and footer settings repeat content on every page: report title in the header, page numbers and the date in the footer, your company name wherever it belongs. Because they live in the page furniture, they never collide with rows in the grid.
The print area decides what counts as the document:
- Select the range to print — the summary table, the dashboard block, the named report region.
- Set it as the print area from the page layout controls.
- Preview: only that range is paginated; everything outside is ignored.
- Redefine it any time the report changes shape.
Print areas pair naturally with named ranges — a report block named q3_summary is one click away in the print settings, and the connection lives in the Name Manager.
Export to PDF and HTML
For distribution, two exports cover most needs:
- PDF freezes layout exactly: fonts, borders, conditional formats and charts render as they appear, and the file opens anywhere. Use it for reports sent outside the team or archived as evidence.
- HTML publishes the sheet as a browser page — handy for intranet dashboards and for readers who just need to look, not calculate.
Both respect your print settings, so the page setup you did for paper carries over. The word processor follows the same philosophy for documents; its workflow is in RixDocs export, PDF and print.
Choosing between them is simpler than it sounds. PDF is the format of record: unalterable layout, opens anywhere, suits anything that might be quoted, signed or archived. HTML suits living pages — an intranet dashboard someone opens weekly — because it stays readable at any zoom and costs nothing to view. And for the middle ground, where the recipient just needs to glance at the numbers in a chat window, the screenshot route below skips the file entirely.
Screenshots for everything else
Sometimes the destination is an email body, a chat window or a slide. RixSheets captures full-page screenshots of the sheet — the visible layout, formatted as on screen — ready to paste where a file attachment would be friction. Charts destined for presentations can go in this way or natively; the chart-to-slide route is covered in charts in RixSheets.
A pre-flight checklist
| Check | Where | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Print area defined | Page layout | Keeps stray columns off the paper |
| Orientation and scale | Page layout | Wide tables need landscape |
| Header and footer set | Page layout | Titles and page numbers on every page |
| Gridlines and colors look right | Format Cells | What prints is what you formatted |
| Preview passes | Print preview | Catches a bad page break before the printer does |
Run the list once per report and printing stops being an adventure — the same discipline the Format Cells dialog brings to what the numbers look like.
Screenshots close the loop for the cases paper and PDF never quite reach: the quick answer pasted into a chat, the visual for a slide, the "here's what I'm looking at" message that saves twenty minutes of "which column do you mean?" Each output route serves its audience — paper for the meeting, PDF for the record, HTML for the intranet, screenshots for the conversation — and all four start from the same page setup you did once.
One habit ties the routes together: set up the page layout before the first export, not after the first complaint. The header, footer and print area you configure in March are still there in June, which means the June report is a preview glance instead of a rebuild. Page setup is a one-time cost per sheet that every future export amortizes.
What to explore next
- Format Cells dialog — make the sheet worth printing.
- RixDocs export, PDF and print — the document side of the same workflow.
- Charts in RixSheets — visuals that survive the trip to paper.
- Import and export CSV and XLSX — choose the right format for the destination.