Strategies For Printing From Mac Numbers

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at printing a section of a Numbers spreadsheet. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 700 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you could read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts. 

A very common question I get is how to print just a section of a spreadsheet in Mac Numbers. A lot of people previously used Microsoft Excel and Excel allows you to setup a print area and just print that area of the spreadsheet. Taking a look here in Numbers one of the things we have to acknowledge about Numbers is that it is fundamentally different than Excel. 

In Numbers you can have a document which is has multiple sheets in it. In this case this one has a budget sheet and a transaction sheet. A sheet is like a canvas. It's just a large white space where you could add all sorts of different things. In this case there's a text box, another text box, a chart here, another chart, and there's a table here. A table is what we usually think of in Excel as a spreadsheet. So we have five different elements here just laid out on the canvas of this sheet. Excel is very different in that a sheet goes edge to edge just cells. You can see there is no white space  and there are no multiple tables. You've got columns and you've got rows that stretches as far as you want in this sheet. 

Even spreadsheets that seem to have multiple elements really don't. Here you can see well there's some charts and what look like different tables but in fact they're not. You can see here there are columns across the top and each one of these things is a cell or group of cells in a column and a row. So everything has to be designed to fit in with the rows and columns here iIf you want to have multiple things on the same sheet. With Numbers I could just add as many tables as I want. I could create another table here and I could stick it wherever I want. I could make it a different size, a different shape. I could make the columns different widths and heights and everything. You have maximum flexibility. 

But with that flexibility comes an issue when you try to print because you can't just simply say I only want to print a section of this because it doesn't really make sense when you have multiple elements on the screen. However that doesn't stop people from wanting to print just a portion of what they see on the screen. So let's take a look at some strategies.

Looking at the second sheet here it's just a long list of transactions. So this is a little similar to what you might use in Excel and here you just might want to print a section of this. So how can you do that? Let's say you wanted to print the first 20 rows here. So I could select this row by clicking on the number to the left. I can Shift Click and select this row. So I've selected here now the first 20 rows. Now how do I print just that? Well there's no way to do it with just Numbers but there's a helper tool that comes with your Mac that can be used in all sorts of different ways called Preview. 

In using Preview you can do this fairly quickly. So here's what you do. All you're going to do with this selected is Copy. So Edit, Copy or just Command C. Now let's launch Preview. I can do it here with Spotlight or you may have it in your Dock already. So with Preview launched, you can see I'm running it up here, I can go to File and you can see New From Clipboard is the default for New. As a matter of fact Command N will get you there. When I do that you get a little document here that's exactly what I selected in Numbers. Numbers and Preview work together so that you can send the selection from Numbers into Preview and give you a nice little area to print out. 

Now for most of us printing actually means saving as a PDF. Well at this point, when you're in Preview it is a PDF. So all you need to do is Save and you'll be saving this out as a PDF file wherever you want it. Or if you do actually want to print to paper you can just go Print here and print it out. So this could be fairly quick and it works with just about any selection in Numbers. So let's go back to the first spreadsheet here. I can click inside this sheet here and I can click the little circle here to the upper left or you can use the trick where you do Select Parent and now I've selected that whole table. Command C, launch Preview, Command N. Now I've got that table in there all by itself and I can Print.

You can even include other things in it. So, for instance, I can do these charts here although charts print as bitmaps so they don't look as smooth as printing out the text table. So if I select this, Command C, then Preview, then Command N it works. But if I zoom in you could see the pixels. 

Now what happens if I just want to print a section of this like say these rows right here. Well I can do Command C, and then switch to Preview, Command N and I'll get those rows. But what if I want the Header row as well. If you try to select that, I'm going to hold the Command key down and select the first row, you can see I've got the first row selected and then rows 12 through 21. Now when I do Command C and then Preview and Command N I get the Header row and I get just the rows I've selected and everything else is blank. Which is nice that it's not showing those but I don't want these blank rows there. 

So here's what you can do. You can simply use the Hide function in Numbers to do this. So instead of selecting the ones I want to Print I'm going to go and Hide a bunch of rows. So let me go and select this row to this row here, Shift Click to select that. Then I can go to Table, Hide Rows. Let's go and select a bunch of other rows here from 22 all the way down to the end. Shift Click to select those. I can also click on the little down arrow here and I can select Hide selected rows. So now I've got just what I want to print. I click the circle here to select the entire table. Copy, Preview, Command N and now I get exactly what I want.

Back here in Numbers I can just use Edit Undo or Command Z to Undo the first Hide and Undo the second Hide or I can go to Table, and say Unhide all rows to get back to where I was. So you do a little bit of prep work and then you go to Print through Preview and then you'll Undo that prep work to get back to the whole table. 

You can also use Filters for this. For instance if I just want to print things that were in the Travel category here I could click here at the top column and say Quick Filter, Show Rows Containing and Travel. That's all I've got there. Now I select this whole table, Copy, Preview, New I get exactly that. Back here I can here and go to Quick Filter, I turn this off, or I can simply go to Edit Undo, Command Z, to get rid of the filter. 

Here's another strategy people like to use. Create another sheet with what you want to print. So I'm going to select this whole table here and Copy it. Then I'm going to go and hit the Plus button here to create a new sheet. Let's delete this table here and Paste in a copy of that previous table. Since that was the only table on that sheet I could have actually gone here and just hit Duplicate to actually make a copy of that sheet. Since this is a copy I can go and do what I want. I can select some of these rows here and then click here and Delete selected rows. I could get rid of a column that I don't need. I can shrink a column if maybe it won't fit on a page otherwise. Do what I need here and then go to Command P to Print this. When I'm done I can then go and Delete this temporary sheet I've created.

Now if you want something a little permanent, something where you're always printing some rows and never printing others you can always add a column and filter by that column. So I'm going to click here, add a New Column After, and call this one Print. Then I'm going to double click on the column header so I select all the regular cells. I'm going to set the Cell format to Checkbox. Basically the idea is that anything you check will Print. So I can check a bunch of these different columns here. I'm going to create a filter here and the filter is going to be anything that's True. So you can see I've only see the rows that are checked. Then the next thing I want to do is Hide this column. Now I go to Print and I only see the rows that are checked off. If I want to change those I need to go here and Unhide that column there and also turn the Filter off and now I can play around with these checkboxes and then turn the Filter On again, Hide this column to Print again.

Also, another problem people had is you can't see what area is going to be printed until they hit Command P. Then you can see it. Well it's actually really easy. Command P, Command period. So you can see how quickly you can get through it. So let's say I wanted to print those checkboxes there but I wanted it to fit on a page. I could look at this and say well, you know what, I could probably shrink this description column a little bit. Command period. Let's go and shrink this column here. Command P. No, not enough. Command period. Let's shrink this category column a bit. Command P. Still not enough. Let's go and shrink the print column. Command P. Ahh! Now it all fits in. See how quickly I can switch between these two modes here and make adjustments.

So there's some different Printing strategies for you. Which one you choose depends upon your specific situation. For instance, copying and pasting into Preview works best when there are only a limited number of rows that are going to fit on a single page. Usually it has to be 200 rows or less although anything more than 100 rows the print gets really small. If you need to print really often it's best to design your spreadsheet from the very beginning for printing. So use Command P, Command period to get back and forth. Design your entire spreadsheet around the PDF or printout want to produce so that you don't have to go through any extra steps every time you want to print.

Remember it's always easy to experiment with Numbers' spreadsheets. Just duplicate the file. Then take the duplicate and play around with it. Maybe redesign it so that it looks better when you create a PDF or print. If you decide that you're headed in the wrong direction you can get rid of that copy and go back to your original. Make another copy and try again. Experimentation is how you're going to be able to get your ideal spreadsheet.