Question Excel for Mac Professional 2019: How to select & position cells for printing into a pre-printed form ?

[John Dohe]

Hi,

Re: Excel for Mac Professional 2019

I've got a pre-printed form with dozens of boxes and fields that have to be
filled in with various data from cells of my spreadsheet.

Not only must I select specific cells to print, but they also have to be positioned
into the various boxes and fields of the pre-printed form.

How to go about this?

Thanks!

 

[Ralston18]

Setting up such things takes some trial and error. It can be very difficult to get the cells lined up with the boxes on the form.

I did a very similar thing many years ago for a company Travel Claim Expense pre-printed form.

I "simply"made the entire spreadsheet model the form.

However that modeling did take some tweaking but with today's Excel (and spreadsheets in general) duplicating the pre-printed form should be much easier. Many more choices for fonts, boxing cells, sizing cells, verifying data entry, etc..

Start from the top of the form and work down. Save the spreadsheet model regularly - there will be do-overs.

Travelers filled in the Excel spreadsheet in and printed out the form with colors and everything. (No computation errors either - much easier and faster for end users.)

And remember that you can, if necessary, link spreadsheets/pages. Enter data on one page and the applicable choices and field values/contents are linked to another page with cells that mimic the pre-printed form. Using two pages could easier if there are drop-down lists, error checks, etc. during form completion.

= = = =

As another option, a database may be easier to work with. Databases use Forms and Reports.

A user friendly data entry Form (with all needed whistles and bells) can be used for Data Entry.

Then when finished the entered data can be printed out as a report matching the pre-printed form.

 

[Corwin65]

It's been years since I had to do this. Used to scan into Acrobat and create form fields.

I did however find this - https://www.quill.com/blog/tutorials/how-to-print-on-pre-printed-forms-using-excel.html

Make sure you let us know what worked best for you.

 

[Alabalcho]

Instead of using Excel, use Word, you can create textboxes whenever you need, then use MailMerge to fill in these fields from your database / spreadsheet.

 

[USAFRet]

Excel is a great calculator.
It is a lousy print or display platform.

There are many ways to get the data out of Excel, and into something print-worthy.
Word mailmerge, Access database reports, others.