I’ll show you how to move page breaks in Excel worksheets in this quick Microsoft Excel tutorial.

Excel page breaks allow you to print only a worksheet’s intended amount of data in a paper sheet or PDF file. However, the default page breaks often aren’t suitable for you. You can customize the printable content if you know the methods and steps to move page breaks.

I’ve shown below both manual and automated methods so you can choose the ones that suit your Excel expertise level and worksheet printing scenarios. Let’s begin!

Move Page Breaks Using the Drag and Drop Actions

Microsoft Excel has a dedicated Page Break Preview mode. You can use this worksheet display to customize the positions of the horizontal and vertical page breaks.

To try out this method, open an Excel worksheet containing page breaks. If you haven’t added any page breaks yet, go through the following Excel tutorial to learn the best methods:

📒 Read More: 8 Ways To Insert Page Break in Microsoft Excel

Once you’re on the target worksheet, click on the View tab on the Excel ribbon menu.

Now, click on the Page Break Preview command inside the Workbook Views block.

You should now enter a special worksheet view showing all active page breaks. Excel will scale down the dimensions of the worksheet so you can get a complete page view of the entire sheet.

If you see dashed page breaks, those are the default ones. Contrarily, solid page break lines represent those added by the user, which could be you or someone else who can also access the workbook.

You’ll be able to move horizontal page breaks up and down. Contrarily, vertical page breaks will only allow movements to the left or right.

Let’s consider, in the above worksheet, you’d like to move the vertical page break between columns I and J to column E.

Hover the mouse cursor over the original page break. The default Excel cursor will change to a two-sided arrow.

Click on the page break. The blue dashed line or solid line page break will change to a thick grey line. It means you can now drag the page break to the left or right.

Move it in between columns E and F. Then, let go of the left mouse click to drop the page break in the new location.

You’ll now see that the dashed-line page break has changed to a solid blue line since you’ve moved the default page break to a new location.

Similarly, you can move the horizontal page break from the border of rows 47 and 48 to another location, like between rows 29 and 30.

All the data within a horizontal and vertical page break will be printed in one PDF or paper sheet.

📒 Read More: 7 Ways to Remove Page Breaks in Microsoft Excel

Enabling Page Break Movements in Excel

If you can’t perform the drag and drop movement for Excel Page Breaks, the feature might not be activated on your Excel desktop app.

To enable this action, open the target workbook and click on the File tab.

Excel Home will open. Click Options at the bottom of the page.

You’ll see the Excel Options dialog box.

Go to the Advanced category in the left-side navigation panel.

On the right, you should now see the editing options section.

Ensure that the checkbox for Enable fill handle and cell drag-and-drop is checkmarked. If it’s not, do that.

Click OK to save the modification.

Move Page Breaks Using Excel VBA

Do you want to automate the entire process of moving page breaks? You can use Excel VBA to create a simple macro. It’ll ask you for the locations where you want to move the vertical and horizontal page breaks. Then, the macro will make the changes and show a confirmation.

However, before you can go ahead with creating the macro, find out from this Microsoft Excel tutorial how to set up a macro in Excel VBA using a VBA script:

📒 Read More: How To Use The VBA Code You Find Online

If you know Excel VBA well or have gone through the above tutorial, use the following script to set up a VBA macro:

Sub MovePageBreaks()
    Dim colNum As Integer
    Dim rowNum As Integer
    Dim msg As String
    
    ' Prompt for column number
    colNum = InputBox("Enter the column number where you want to move the vertical page break:", "Vertical Page Break")
    
    ' Prompt for row number
    rowNum = InputBox("Enter the row number where you want to move the horizontal page break:", "Horizontal Page Break")
    
    ' Check if the input is valid
    If IsNumeric(colNum) And IsNumeric(rowNum) Then
        ' Clear existing page breaks
        ActiveSheet.ResetAllPageBreaks
        
        ' Add the vertical page break
        ActiveSheet.VPageBreaks.Add Before:=Cells(1, colNum)
        
        ' Add the horizontal page break
        ActiveSheet.HPageBreaks.Add Before:=Cells(rowNum, 1)
        
        ' Show confirmation message
        msg = "Vertical page break moved to column " & colNum & vbCrLf & "Horizontal page break moved to row " & rowNum
        MsgBox msg, vbInformation, "Page Breaks Moved"
    Else
        MsgBox "Please enter valid numeric values for both column and row numbers.", vbExclamation, "Invalid Input"
    End If
End Sub

After creating the macro, press Alt + F8 to launch the Macro dialog box.

Highlight the MovePageBreaks macro and click on the Run button to execute the script.

The VBA script will show a visual message so you can enter the column number where you’d like to relocate the existing vertical page break.

Another dialog box will ask you for the row number for the new position of the horizontal page break.

Once you enter all the values as requested, Excel VBA will move the page breaks and update the status with a confirmation message.

Conclusions

So far, you’ve learned two intuitive methods to move page breaks in Excel.

If you need to adjust the printable area for an Excel worksheet occasionally, you can use the manual method that involves the drag-and-drop movement of Excel Page Breaks.

However, if you need to resize printable areas for multiple worksheets or workbooks and perform this task frequently, you should try the Excel VBA-based method that automates the entire process.

Did this Microsoft Excel tutorial help you? Comment below to share your feedback or suggestions.