the print area and page breaks, including any inserted manually, are saved. You can verify this by printing a spreadsheet after having saved and reopened it. (Use one in which the print area and page breaks are not the defaults so that you can be sure it is using the saved information.) You will find the page layout is exactly as it was prior to the save, indicating the layout was preserved. Also, the fact that you can easily redisplay these settings means they have been saved. Just because you cannot see them on the spreadsheet view does not mean they were not saved, are not there, and cannot be used. It is just that Microsoft does not display them after a save and reopen. You do not need to go through the process or reestablishing them; they work just as well unseen as seen. If you do want to see them it is just a few mouse clicks, and that is not reestablishing them, merely displaying them.
If you do want the page boundaries visible all of the time, I guess you have no option other than the macro you are now using. I can find no way to change this in Excel itself. But running a macro just to display them seems to me as much trouble as the three mouss clicks (File / Page Preview and then Close)needed to to the same.
Why is this so? Why is the Page Breaks choice under Tools / Options not carried over as other options are? Is it a bug, an oversight, or is it by conscious choice? I do not know -- you probably must ask Microsoft's Excel programming group to get an answer to this. (It is at least 95% certain they would say it is an intended ''feature.'') Perhaps they feel that most users want them hidden most of the time -- that they consider them a distraction when working on the sheet. Because it is so easy to display them at will, it may not be considered any problem.
Although neither hiding them nor showing them is a big deal for me, I guess I do tend to lean slightly in favor of them being hidden. Once I have set up a spreadsheet and specified its page layout, I really do not need to see the boundaries on the sheet view -- I know they will be where I set them. If I alter the spreadsheet in a manner such that I desire to see and/or reset the boundaries, I can get to that option with two mouse clicks.
What does seem likely is that Microsoft has had relatively few complaints about this over the years and several versions of Excel. If users had complained en masse, it might have been changed, as it seems it should be a rather trivial programming effort.
Frank