Numbers margins! Why!

Hi Katherine,

It is unclear what your tables look like from your description.

You can adjust margins in the print dialogue view

It may be that your table is simply a lot smaller than the area of the sheet's canvas that is being printed. you can drag the edges of a table to make it larger using the little square boxes.

Select the table using the bullseye inthe upper left. Drag a box.

You can check the width here

quinn

Hi Katherine,

Perhaps you know this but a Numbers table is simply a table on a variable canvas. the canvas has little relation to what a print page will look like. That is to saythe canvas can be much greater than what Numbers will be trying to print.

To answer your question

As you can see, ⌘P works as well.

If you are not seeing the options for margins on the Print screen it is possible you just need to scroll. It may be you are using a different version of the software.

⌘ option 4 will allow you to drag a box around what you are looking at and post it using the mountain icon at the bottom of the reply box. I can't see what you are seeing.

quinn

HI Katherine,

Numbers does not define "pages" until you are printing, or preparing to print. At that point, it uses the dimensions of the paper stock you have specified* and the margin settings provided** to determine what will fit the number of columns and rows that will fit into the available print space on each sheet of paper.

Example: the table shown below (note the zoom scale at upper left) will fit vertically on a single US Letter sized sheet in landscape orientation. Horizontally, it needs several sheets. (Ignore the content—the table was created to answer a previous question, and the error flagged rows were added for this occasion.)

Pressing command-p opens the Print setup screen, which displays a reduced version of the table as it will be transferred to paper using the current scale (independent of the zoom scale used for the screen image above) and margin settings.

Several things to note here:

The dark blue background tells the user 'You are in Print Setup mode" a mode where you can set the printing instructions and edit the page headers and footers, but cannot edit the spreadsheet itself.

Margin settings are near the bottom of the Print Setup pane. The settings shown are the default ones. They can be changed by clicking the stepper control beside each box, or by editing the number in the box.

Header and Footer (below Margins) refers to the Page headers and Page Footers. These are boxes containing text that is to appear on the printed pages. To edit the content, hover the pointer in the space between the table and the edge of the page, then click in the box that appears. These headers and footers do not appear in the editing mode (where "pages" do not exist).

Repeat Table Headers refers to the Header row(s) and Header column(s) of the Table. As can be seen in the screen shots, checking the box makes column A (a Header column) display on each page to be printed.

The Content Scale slider and the stepper control beside the box showing 100% can be used to adjust the scale of the table to fit it onto a smaller number of pages. For this document, setting the scale to 94% fit the document onto three pages with the existing margin settings.

Clicking the Fit button reduces the document to fit on a single page. (34% of full size for the example).

When you are 'done' with editing the Print Setup controls, you have two choices at the bottom of the pane:

Done will return you to editing mode, retaining the edits that you have made on this pane.

Print will move you ahead to the Print dialogue, where you can (if necessary) edit the printer settings, and click Print to send the document to the Printer.

Regards,

Barry

*often the paper size you specified when you last used the printer.

**default margin widths are set in the template you used to make the document, and are, as you note, quite wide.

Hi Katherine,

Different situation indeed. I do not see anyway to adjust printing margins in iOS.

The printer itself could be contributing to some of the built in margins. To minimize them, you might try dragging the table up and to the left as much as you can, so the table is sitting at the top left edge of the canvas.

quinn

"Does it help to know I'm working from an iPad?"

Yes it does.

I suspect I was writing my reply above when you posted this statement. As Quinn has noted, Numbers for iOS is a different beast, one that appears to not offer much in the way of user control in fitting the document to pages.

You may find a better answer in the iWork for iOS community, where the main topics involve the iOS versions of the three iWork apps.

Would you like me to request a transfer to that community? (As author, you will continue to follow the discussion and get the email with links as you do now.

Regards,

Barry

Hi Katherine,

Those are Numbers screenshots.

quinn