Excel printing and display scaling bug

Same thing happening for me and my team. Windows 10 with the latest office offerings (O365). Like others have said, excel prints normal when Windows scaling is set to 100%. Prints wrong when set to anything else. We use excel to generate proposals...only can print them when in the office and docked to our 27" 1080p monitors. Whenever you disconnect the external monitors, Windows changes scaling to better fit the small laptop screen. This causes excel to print incorrectly. MICROSOFT, WE NEED A FIX. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE!

Unfortunately this bug will likely never be fixed. The way the size and display is calculated is too fundamental to how Excel works. It would require a complete rewrite. The code's too deep. "Ya can't get thar from here!" The only thing that works for sure is to require everyone in your organization to use 100% scaling. Obviously this is no good for those of us with bad eyesight and/or 4K monitors. Some workarounds I've come up with:

• Set your monitor to a lower resolution, like 1080p or lower. This looks like **** on a high DPI display, but at 100% scaling, printing will be correct.
• Buy a giant 42in. 1080p television and use this as your monitor. They don't manufacture these anymore, but they should be available second hand for the next several years.
• Sit closer to your 4K monitor. (Shut up, Mom! I have no other choice!)
• Buy eyeglasses.
• Do the whole "Set to 100%, sign out, sign in, print, set to 125%, sign out, sign in" rain dance every time you need to print or do pixel perfect formatting adjustments.
• Sign into Windows with your settings at 100%. Change to 125% and DO NOT sign out. This makes everything bigger but maintains the original draw distance between cells. However, you get blurry elements including dialog boxes. Again, what's the point of a high DPI display if my s***'s blurry?
  • Another version of this fix is to have two monitors, one at 100%, the other at 125%. This only works when the 100% monitor is set as your primary display. And surprise! You still get blurriness on the 125%. (I suspect messing around with a laptop dock has the same behavior, but I haven't tested it.)
• Leave it at 125% and just fiddle with the formatting until it prints like you want, or the universe ends, whichever comes first.

None of these solutions are ideal, but mark my words: Microsoft will not be fixing this bug this decade. Does anyone else have a hacky workaround?

(One parting thought. I tried it on two separate computers, with different graphics cards, and I fiddled with the graphics settings on each: Nothing. It doesn't have anything to do with graphics card settings. Prove me wrong.)

Good explanation, "Yu can't get thar from here!", however for a company the size of Microsoft, not very acceptable. One of the reasons for scaling is recognizing not all humans have the same physical characteristics, and being able to see small print vs. big print falls into the category of accessibility. Having modern day billion dollar software that cannot print in sync with visual scaling is poor, and below Microsoft's benchmark. Its like saying we can't figure out how to have a wheel chair accessible washroom in an office building.

Disappointing that this is the answer provided by a blue chip company like Microsoft.

I don't like the feedback hub because it feels like you are talking to a brick wall.  When I have a problem I want someone to respond.  How do I know if they are doing anything or understand the problem?  In any case.  If others want to upvote, I've created a feedback hub report here:  https://aka.ms/AA69r35

Hi.

This an issue which has existed for many years. Did you fix it?

Many frusrated people around the internet.

I have a sheet where I insert pictures as vector grafic(.emf format). When printing to pdf in excel (in original size without scaling), the data in the pictures (not the frame) is scaled differently in the x and y direction, and the excel sheet in generel is shortened in the y-direction while it maintains the desired scale in the x-direction.

The same thing happens when printing directly on a physical printer.

Hi Matthew,

Thanks a lot for the information you provided.

According to this support article about scaling a worksheet, we can use the Scale to Fit options to reduce the size of the worksheet to better fit the printed page. And based on my test with an original workbook which was printed to 3 pages, it will be printed to 6 pages after I set 205% for the scale value. Thus, it indicates that scaling affects printing. If you just want to enlarge the display view, you may click View>Zoom to adjust.

Best Regards,

Zixuan