There's a quiet comedy in the question itself, and we should honor it before we get to the real issue. A user on Reddit, going by That_mf_juan27, is stuck trying to resize a sheet in Excel, and they've arrived at a genuinely thoughtful hypothesis: maybe the lack of a connected printer is the reason. It isn't, of course. But the instinct to look for a cause, to map a digital frustration onto a physical absence, is exactly the kind of mental shortcut that spreadsheet software has trained us to take for decades. We've all been there, staring at a greyed-out option, assuming the problem must be something we're missing, not something the tool is missing.
The real problem isn't the missing printer. It's that Excel still treats page setup, margins, and sheet size as if you're preparing to send something through a fax machine. The software's mental model is built around paper, even when you've never touched a ream in your life. That's not a user failure. That's a design constraint dressed up as a feature. The person asking this question isn't confused because they're new to spreadsheets; they're confused because they've correctly identified an inconsistency in the tool's logic. If there's no printer, why would the software care about margins? It shouldn't. And yet it does, because the underlying architecture predates the cloud, collaboration, and the very idea of a spreadsheet as a living document rather than a static printout.
This is where the conversation gets interesting, and where we'd point you to a related piece we've run on Excel not filtering unique values. That story, like this one, is about a user hitting a wall not because the task is hard, but because the software's logic doesn't align with how people actually think about data. Filtering for unique values should be simple. It isn't always. Resizing a sheet should be simple. It isn't. The common thread is that legacy tools force you to learn their quirks before you can do your work, and that's a tax on your time and attention. It's also why we've been exploring what happens when you bring AI-native logic to these problems, as we did in Unlock ChatGPT Work's Potential: A Clear-Eyed Look at Strengths & Limits. The point isn't that AI should magically fix margins; it's that a smarter tool would understand *intent* over *settings*. It would ask, "Are you trying to print this, or are you trying to share it?" and then act accordingly.
So what would we tell That_mf_juan27 directly? First, you're not wrong to wonder. The printer connection is a red herring, but it's a reasonable one given how the software is designed. Second, the fix is to stop thinking about sheet size as a property of the document and start thinking about it as a property of the output. If you're not printing, you don't need margins. You need a canvas. The fact that you can't easily make that distinction in Excel is the story here. And it's a story that repeats across thousands of small frustrations daily, from filtering to formatting to Power Query help spitting data from a column into multiple new columns, which is another instance where the tool asks you to adapt to its structure rather than the other way around.
The takeaway you can quote: *If a tool blocks you for a reason that has nothing to do with your goal, the tool is the problem, not you.* Don't chase the printer. Chase a tool that treats your data as a living thing, not a piece of paper waiting to be filed. The question isn't why you can't resize the sheet. It's why you're still using a tool that makes you ask.