Google Sheets is a cool spreadsheet web app similar to Microsoft Excel that has become increasingly popular over the past few years. It allows you to easily work with spreadsheets online and for free.
But if you want to print a Google sheet, by default it will print out the entire sheet which could end up being quite a lot of pages if it is very large. Luckily, there is actually a very easy way that you can specify a small section of the sheet that you want to print.
This can be very handy if you just want to print a specific part of your Google sheet, and in this article, I’m going to show you how it’s done.
Prefer to watch a video on how to set a print area in Google Sheets? Click here.
How To Set The Print Area In Google Sheets
To set the print area in your Google Sheet, you’ll first need to highlight everything that you want to be printed. To do this, click in the top left corner of the section you want to print and then drag the mouse to the bottom right corner of what you want to print.
Once you’ve selected the cells you want to print, the next step is to click on the printer icon near the top left-hand corner of the screen.
You’ll then notice that it is still about to print the entire sheet. To change this and make it only print the cells you’ve selected, click on where it says “Current sheet” near the top right-hand corner of the screen and change it to “Selected cells”.
If you look at the print preview now, you will see that it’s only going to print the cells that you highlighted before.
Depending on the shape and size of the section you selected, you might want to adjust some of the other settings before you continue.
By default, “Paper size” is set to “letter”, but as most printers print on A4 paper, you’ll probably want to change it to “A4”.
And by default, the “Page orientation” is set to “Landscape” which is often the best orientation for spreadsheets, but if you’ve selected a tall and skinny section, you might be better off setting it to “Portrait”.
If you’re only printing a fairly small section of your sheet like I am in this example, changing the “Scale” option won’t really make a difference, but if you’re printing a rather large section of your spreadsheet, you might want to adjust the “Scale” option to see what works best for you.
The same can be said for the “Margins” option, if you’re only printing a small section, it won’t make much difference, but if you’re trying to fit a lot of information on one page, you might want to set the margins to be smaller.
The “Formatting” and “Headers & footers” options are really no different to any other time you print a Google Sheet so I won’t get into them here, but if you think any of those options might be good, feel free to look through them.
Once you’re happy with all your print settings, click on “NEXT” in the top right-hand corner.
You will then see the same printing options that you would normally see whenever you print anything from your web browser, I’m using Google Chrome so I’m seeing Chrome’s normal print options, but if you’re in any other web browser, you’ll see the print options that you get in that browser.
Then, just choose your printer, adjust the print settings to however you normally would, and when you’re ready, click “Print”.
And that’s it, you’re done! Now you know how to quickly and easily print a specific section of a Google Doc!
