iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Previewing Your Spreadsheet in Print View

The way your Numbers spreadsheet looks onscreen doesn’t typically reflect how it’ll look when you print it. Spreadsheets often have many more rows and columns than can fit on a single sheet of paper. But unlike Pages, which shows you a true-to-life view of every page break for lengthy text documents, Numbers normally keeps its page breaks to itself while you’re editing. That’s a good thing—when you’re updating a data-dense table, the last thing you want to do is dodge page margins and leap across page breaks. Better for your info to be displayed seamlessly, without interruption.

Eventually, though, you’ll want to see what your document looks like on paper before you send it to the printer. Numbers gives you a separate view—Print view—that lets you organize how your document will look on the printed page (or when you export your spreadsheet to a PDF file, for example). This view shows you where page breaks appear and lets you move and resize objects until you get the layout you want.

Before jumping into Print view, though, make sure you’ve got your document and sheet layout set up the way you want them.

Page Setup

Unlike most Mac programs, Numbers doesn’t offer the tried-and-true Page Setup option in its File menu, the place where you normally set your paper size, preferred printer, and page orientation. Instead, those details are handled in the Document and Sheet Inspectors: Choose the page size and printer in the Document Inspector’s Printer ...