I work in a corporate environment using Office 365 in Windows 10. I’m the production manager for proposals, some of which require hardcopy submission. Although I am familiar with wrangling Excel worksheets to fit on a printed page, challenges have recently arisen on two occasions that I don’t understand.
In the first case, the Excel provided by the client for filling-in included locked cells; in the second, cells were not locked, but the second row had dropdown arrows indicating some functionality (sorting?). In the first case, a hardcopy submission was required; in the second, I was asked to prepare so, in case the client decided to print after submission.

In each case, a PDF copy was required of one or more workbooks with between 6 and 15 worksheets. Worksheets were formatted to fit 8.5x11 paper, either portrait or landscape. Margins, page-break view, and page layout view were checked, and scaling percentage was checked to avoid illegibly small font size.
In the locked-cell case, for which we were in the office, we ran into a problem trying to print from Excel itself to an medium-size (three-drawer) office printer. Despite all efforts, the worksheets, despite displaying properly in print preview, were either spilling off the page or reducing themselves to perhaps 1/16 of the page area, down in the lower left. Printing from a PDF copy finally resolved the problem. I could only guess that it might be a print driver issue, but we did not experience this with any other documents or file types.

In the second case, I was responsible and working from home, without access to a printer. After checking and adjusting the formatting of all the sheets for 8.5x11 landscape layout, I first found that some of them, in page layout view, showed all the content, but no right margin was displayed, while others displayed just fine. On the former, the ruler at the top of the page in page layout view showed the content ending within bounds, e.g., 6.5 inches on the right. adjusting the content for a narrower right column did not make any margin appear. Then, when I PDF’d the workbook -- which I tried using several approaches, both the PDF feature in Excel and setting Acrobat Pro as my default printer, which is on my machine -- I found the page size changing for some worksheets, creating, visually, at least three distinct page sizes.

Excel almost always crates problems to print, in my experience, even on the large production printer I sometimes use, and PDFing the workbook is usually the best (or only) means of printing a workbook with varying page sizes in one pass. Therefore, I will appreciate any insights into the process of getting from Excel to PDF, or Excel to print, more generally.

Thank you.