I think I've replicated the problem here and to be honest it does look like
poor handling by Excel which I couldn't find a way around. Instead of
setting "columns to repeat" you could insert columns where they need to
appear manually and copy columns A and B into them, but if you are passing
the file onto the client then it would look awful.
If you only send the printout to the client and the sole reason you don't
want to copy the 'repeated' columns manually is that the sheet is constantly
changing and it would be a tedious process, I'm reasonably confident we
could come up with a macro that would run itself when you hit print to
automate the whole thing. It could insert extra columns on the left of each
page, copy in the data from A and B, print, and finally delete the extra
columns it created. Come to think of it, we could turn off screen refreshing
while all this happens so even if you give the original file to the client
they would never know what is going on - it would just take a few seconds
longer (which is unlikely to be noticeable if the file really is as large as
you say).

If the macro idea sounds like it could be acceptable, I would really like a
small sample of your file to work from. I imagine it would only need to be a
single worksheet, say the first 5 or 10 rows and all the columns. Obviously
you can change the headers and data as much as you like provided each cell
still contains something which is representative of the length of data in
the 'proper' file.

If you're interested in this, I'd prefer email correspondence because I'm
more likely to pick it up. Use paul at cundle dot co dot uk. I don't imagine
anything further would be of interest in the newsgroup now anyway.

Finally, you might be surprised at how well .xls files compress into a zip
file.

Paul C,