Jim,

It's likely to be a trial and error sort of thing. On my system right now it shows default column widths of 8.43 (64 pixels). If I print preview, and ignore the error about nothing to print, it draws the page boundaries between columns I and J, R and S etc. This is also affected by whatever default margins are set for the page as well. There's also the Scaling options to consider.

But with 0.75 left & right margins I have 7 printable inches. ( 9 * 8.43 ) / 7 gives me 10.84 characters per inch.

I don't think this stuff is as printer selection independent as you think. Right now my page setup dialog shows print quality of 1200 dpi, which is based on the default printer I have selected in windows right now.

>But, Excel determines before you've selected a printer where the break between columns will be ... that is, which columns fit on the current page.
>
>Doesn't that mean that considering printer pixels is not the issue? It appears that you should be able to compute the sum of the column widths (as reported by Excel), divide this by some constant which is the dependent on default font in Excel, and that should tell you how many inches wide the printed output will be. (Even if this is true, there doesn't seem to be a method yet to determine what that constant would be.)