Printing large images for a bigger wood-burning project used to be out of the question. But a trick I learned some years ago is that with Microsoft Excel, I’ve been able to print patterns for any size I desire. In this guide, I’ll walk you through the steps to size an image for a big print using Excel.
The first thing of course is to know the measurements of the piece you will be using for your wood-burning project. Once you have the size for the wood piece that you will be using, you will need to open Excel and insert your image.
You will insert the image into Excel and then select the image, click on Picture Format, and fill in the height and width for your wood piece.
And to use as much of the paper as you can you will want to adjust the margins under the page Layout. I set all of my margins to Zero, and then I go to print and preview it before actually printing so I know how it will print. I then cancel it out if needed to make any adjustments to the margins.
Once I am satisfied, I will then click on print. In my example, I chose 20 inches weight and it will take 6 pages to print. Once it’s printed, you will then tape it together and trim one of the pieces so that you can line up the image. On the image seen, I would trim the top of page two and then tape it to page one.
When you are working on smaller pieces of wood, the process is the same, you will just need to adjust the dimensions. I use this process for bookmarks, coasters, and the like and then print multiple patterns on a single page.
While Excel might not be the first tool that comes to mind for image editing, it’s been pretty handy when I want to create a large wood-burning project.
You can use this process for some of my patterns and tutorials in the Pyrography Academy.