Excel Workbook Views: Normal, Page Layout & More

What You'll Be Able to Do, and What to Know Before Switching Excel Workbook Views

Adepartment head at my company once walked up to my desk holding a printout, four pages, with the last column sliced clean off the right edge. The report was mine. I'd built it in Normal view, hit print, and never once checked how it would actually come out. That's the moment I started treating Excel workbook views as a real part of my workflow, not an afterthought. This guide walks you through all five view types in Microsoft Excel, when to use each one, and how to save your preferred setup so you're not reconfiguring every time you open the file.

Before you start: Sheet View, one of the five views covered here, requires Microsoft 365 and a file stored on OneDrive or SharePoint. If you're on a standalone Excel license or working in Excel for the web, your options will look different. I'll point those out as we go rather than burying them in a footnote.

If you're still getting comfortable with the Excel interface overall, the Excel for Beginners starter guide is worth reading first.

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Step 1: Get to Know the Three Core Excel Workbook Views (and When Each One Actually Helps)

All three of these live in the same place: the View tab on the ribbon, leftmost group, under "Workbook Views." You can also switch between them using the three small icons at the bottom-right corner of the Excel window. Takes about two clicks either way.

Normal View: Your everyday workspace

This is what Excel opens in by default. No page borders, no margin indicators, just your data and your grid. Normal view is where you build, edit, and analyze. It's fast and uncluttered, which is exactly what you want when you're mid-formula or pulling data from another sheet.

Here's the thing: most users never leave Normal view. And that's fine, until they need to print something.

Page Layout View: See exactly what prints before you print it

Page Layout view is the one I switch to before any report leaves my desk. You see your actual page margins, the header and footer areas, and where your columns fall relative to the page edge. It's the view that catches problems (a table that runs a half-inch too wide, a footer that's printing over your last row of data) before a department head sees them.

In my own work building department reports since 2017, this view has saved me more than a few embarrassing printouts. I don't treat it as a troubleshooting step. I treat it as the final check before I send anything.

Mac users: On a MacBook (I test on a MacBook Air M1 alongside my Windows 11 desktop), the Page Layout view tab sits in the same ribbon location, but the page rendering and zoom behavior feel slightly different. The logic is identical, the visual experience isn't quite the same. If yours looks a little different from screenshots online, it's still working correctly.

Page Break Preview: Fix awkward page splits in seconds

Page Break Preview shows you a bird's-eye view of your spreadsheet with blue lines marking where Excel plans to break pages. The solid blue lines are manual breaks you've set. The dashed ones are automatic, Excel's best guess at where each page should end.

That's the one that actually shows you where Excel plans to cut your data.

You can drag those dashed lines to adjust where breaks fall. If you've got a table that splits across pages in an awkward spot, this view lets you fix it by hand in about thirty seconds.

Heads up: Page Break Preview is not available in Excel for the web. If you're working in a browser, you'll need the desktop app to adjust breaks.

For a deeper look at all the display options that live alongside these views, the View tab and workbook display options guide covers the full ribbon group.

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Step 2: Save Your Preferred Setup with Custom Views or Sheet View

Once you've got your view and print settings where you want them, it's worth knowing you don't have to redo that work every time you open the file. Excel gives you two ways to save a view configuration, and they're not interchangeable.

Custom Views: Save and reapply display and print settings instantly

A Custom View saves your current display settings (zoom level, frozen panes, row and column visibility, and print settings) as a named snapshot you can return to in one click.

To create one:

1. Go to View > Custom Views > Add.
2. Give it a name.
3. Choose whether to include print settings and hidden rows/columns.
4. Click OK.

To switch back to a saved Custom View later, open the same dialog, select your view name, and click Show. That's it.

This is a genuinely underused feature. I've used it on complex department reports where I need one layout for on-screen review and a different one for print: two Custom Views, zero reconfiguration.

Sheet View: The collaborative (and solo) view-switcher most people miss

Sheet View does something different. Instead of saving display settings, it lets you apply filters and sorts that are private to your session, so if you're co-editing a file on SharePoint with a colleague, you can filter a column without moving the data they're looking at.

To create one:

1. Go to View > Sheet View > New.
2. Excel switches you into a temporary view with a dark banner at the top.
3. Apply any filters or sorts you want; they stay in this view only.
4. Click Keep and name your view to save it for next time.

Here's the thing: Sheet View isn't only useful for multi-user collaboration. If you regularly switch between two different filtered versions of the same dataset, Sheet View is the cleanest way to do that without manually reapplying filters each time. The catch: it requires Microsoft 365 and the file must live on OneDrive or SharePoint. Local files won't have access to this feature.

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Common Mistakes When Using Excel Workbook Views, and How to Avoid Them

Two mistakes come up more than any others, and one of them has a non-obvious cause.

Custom Views is greyed out, and you can't figure out why.

If you open the Custom Views dialog and the "Add" button is unavailable, check whether any sheet in your workbook contains an Excel Table (not just tabular data, an actual formatted Table inserted via Insert > Table). Excel disables Custom Views for the entire workbook if even one Table exists anywhere in it. Converting the Table back to a range fixes the problem. This is one of the least-documented limitations I've run into, and it trips up experienced users.

Using the wrong tool for the job.

Custom Views store display and print settings. Sheet Views store filter and sort states for collaborative editing. They overlap just enough to cause confusion, but they're solving different problems. If you're trying to save a print layout, that's Custom Views. If you're trying to filter without affecting a colleague's screen, that's Sheet View.

Getting this straight saves a lot of frustration, especially if you've just spent ten minutes wondering why your "saved view" didn't preserve your filters.

For more on how the ribbon is organized around these features, the Excel interface and navigation guide covers how the View tab fits into the broader interface layout.

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