How to Print Selected Cells in Google Sheets (Step-by-Step)

Spreadsheet software like Google sheets is usually multi-faceted. So, you can use the same software to view, analyze, present, and print your data.

These data processing software lets you use formulas to consolidate information from datasets, which you can then use to prepare and print reports too.

Unfortunately printing spreadsheets onto paper is not exactly as intuitive as printing a word processing document.

There are a number of print settings and options that you will need to get right in order to print just what you need.

Print Options in Google Sheets

Google Sheets gives you a number of printing options so that you can print either a whole sheet, a whole table, or just a selection of cells.

It also lets you select the size and orientation of the paper you want to print on, the amount of margin you want, and the amount of data you want to print on one page.

With all these options, it’s sometimes overwhelming when you want to just print a small portion of your worksheet.

If you don’t set the right options, you might end up printing more data than you need. Besides making the resulting print look messy, it also ends up wasting paper and ink.

So, it’s important you set your print options to exactly the amount of data you need.

In this tutorial, we will show you how you can set your print options to print only selected cells in your sheet (i.e., only print the selection and ignore everything else on the sheet).

How to Print Selected Cells In Google Sheets

Once you have your document ready to print, follow these steps to print a selection of cells from your Google Sheet:

1. Select the cells that you want to print. You can do this by dragging your mouse over the required area of cells or by pressing down the Shift key to select the first and last cells of your required range.
2. Click the File menu from the menu bar.
3. Select the Print option. Alternatively, you could press CTRL+P (if you’re on a PC) or Cmd+P (if you’re on a Mac).
4. This will take you to the Print Settings view, where you can see a preview of your printed page/ pages.
5. On the right-hand side, you should see a sidebar with options for different print settings. The default option is to print everything on the current sheet. However, since you only want to print your selected cell range, you need to click on the dropdown arrow under the word “Print” (which you will find at the top of the sidebar).
6. This will show you a dropdown list of different print options. Click on the “Selected Cells” option from the list.
7. After this, you can select the other print options like Paper size, page orientation, etc. You can also select other formatting options like grid lines, headers, footers, etc.
8. Once you have all your print settings in place and your print preview looks good to print, hit the Next button.
9. In the next window, click “Print” to finish the job and send your completed sheet for printing.

Your printer should now start printing your selected cells with your preferred print settings.

Setting the Page Orientation

You should choose a page orientation depending on the number and size of cells in your printed range. The default setting is landscape.

Use this orientation if you have a large number of columns in your selection and want to fit all columns into one page.

If, instead you have a small number of columns, but want to fit a large number of rows in one page, then go for the portrait orientation.

To select this orientation, simply select the radio button next to “Portrait” under Page orientation.

Making sure the Cells Fit the Page Correctly

If you find your data spilling out of the page in the print preview, you can scale your data to one of the following settings:

1. Fit to width: Use this setting if you want to fit all columns of your selection into one page.
2. Fit to height: Use this setting if you want to fit all rows of your selection into one page.
3. Fit to page: Use this setting if you want to fit all rows and columns of your selection into one page.

To make a scale selection, click on the dropdown arrow below “Scale”, and select your required option. By default, the scale is set to “Normal”.

It is important to note, though, that choosing one of the three scales shown above will result in Google Sheets trying to lower the font size of your data to make it fit on one page.

If you have a lot of data in the sheet, your font size might end up becoming so small that it becomes difficult to read.

So make sure you check the print preview before hitting the Print button.

Note: If you have a very small range of cells to print, then it might end up looking odd with a whole lot of white space, and the data squished in one corner of the sheet. So, a good option would be to scale your data up so it takes up more space on the page.

For this, you need to select the Custom Number option from the Scale settings.

This will display an additional input box to the right of the scale option, where you can enter how much you want the data to get scaled. If you want to make the data larger, enter a number greater than 100%.

Your selected data should now appear enlarged in print preview, take up more area on the page as shown below:

In this tutorial, we showed you how you can print selected cells from your Google Sheets, without having to print out the entire spreadsheet.

We also provided some additional information on how you can set up the page so that you get your selected cells printed exactly the way you need them.

We hope this tutorial has been helpful to you.

Other Google Sheets tutorials you may like:

• Limitations of Google Sheets (Row/Column/File Size)
• How to Insert a Page Break in Google Sheets