How do I print or export only selected cells in Numbers?

Question

How do I print or export only selected cells in Numbers?

Does anyone know how to do this in Numbers? I have been trying to do this for well over an hour...... I have looked at other posters' questions first, all the way back to 2008 in fact. The closest I have seen to an answer (and it is a workaround, not a true answer) is copy the selected cells into a new sheet. I have been using software spreadsheets (Lotus 123 and later Excel) going back to the mid-1980's. I cannot remember the last time I could not do this.

Friends, I do realize that many of the workarounds would have taken far less time than what I have invested, please do not feel the need to point that out. I am heading for a workaround right now as I have run out of time to devote to this task. Also, please do not suggest that I should "capture" the data by copying a screen shot to the clipboard or have it dump a .png on my desktop. Most of us here should know how to do that by now but that does not address the underlying issue of how to provide only a select piece of a spreadsheet to a 3rd party in a professional looking format. Well, off to copy and paste........ 🙂

Thanks in advance,

Bill G.

Update (15 min later):

Boy, I hope one of you out there knows the solution to this. Copy and paste the selected area does not work either. You lose (this was an "Oh, duh!" sort of moment BTW) any figures populated by calculations not in the selection area.

Need to go eat, will try to feed the values in the new table from the same calculations in the first table. I can do that easily in Excel, I just have not tried it yet in Numbers. I am optomistic that it will work.

Thanks again,

Bill G.

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.1)

Posted on Oct 1, 2011 4:23 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Oct 1, 2011 7:53 PM in response to Wm Gardner (Bill is fine)

Bill,

Here's my favorite workflow for printing a partial table. I prefer not to call it a workaround. If I had thought ahead, I'd have isolated those cells in one table/sheet in the first place.

Select the range to Print

Command-C

Switch to Preview.app

Command-N

Command-P

Jerry

Reply

Answer 2

Oct 1, 2011 5:35 PM in response to Wm Gardner (Bill is fine)

There is no "print selected cells" feature in Numbers. You can copy the cells and paste them into another sheet. The only trick there is that IF the cells you copies contain formulas you should use the variation of paste called "Paste Values".

If you paste values into another sheet then you can print only those cells. If you plan to print that selection of cells often you can make a "Print Sheet" with a table which references the specific cells yo want to print.

Reply

Answer 3

KOENIG Yvan

Level 8

41,825 points

Oct 3, 2011 5:01 AM in response to Jerrold Green1

As I'm lazy, I use this script and paste where I want.

--{code}

set the clipboard to (the clipboardas «class PDF »)

--{code}

I made a test which gave a funny result.

Given a Numbers document with a chart.

I selected the chart, the title and the legends

then I grouped these objects.

Select all

copy

run the script

I pasted in the sheet to be able to take a screenshot.

It's a bit inconsistent.

Text values are passed when they are in cells

They are passed when they are used as value labels in the chart

but they aren't passed when they are chart's title or legend's components.

Funny behavior, the graphic symbols are moved in the process to the location where they would be if the text components were nil strings.

No comment upon a table's title which can't be selected with the table itself.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 3 octobre 2011 14:01:20

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.0

My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>

Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community

Reply

Answer 4

Oct 1, 2011 10:04 PM in response to Wayne Contello

Thank-you Wayne! That is exactly what ended up working for me and I guess we had that whole "like minds" thing going on as I also had dedicated a sheet to print from, once I realized that this feature is missing. The only thing I did different is (after I used "paste values") I have my "Print Sheet" using formulas to reference the calculated values on the "Live Sheet". That way I don't need to update these fields each time need to pull this information out.

I appreciate your help!

Bill G.

Reply

Answer 5

Oct 1, 2011 10:33 PM in response to Jerrold Green1

Thanks for replying Jerrold, I appreciate you taking the time to read and assist with my frustrating problem.

Honestly, I am not accustom to a workflow like you have described, one where you are esentually "taking a picture" of data and then using a separate application to print said "picture". I appreciate that this due to my experience being developed using programs which do allow the dynamic selection and establishment of print areas. I am sure that as I use Numbers, I will find features which I like better than other applications too.

Once upon a time Jerrold, I used to write a lot of code, mostly BASIC and SQL, but it did force me to develop a mindset of planning my work to be flexible and to require minimal maintenance down the road. While I am glad that your screen capture process works well for you, I am not comfortable with taking the data and then creating an output that can only be an image. In my experience, what tends to happen is the end user likes the report and then wants to share it with everyone else. So then I have to develop an output to send a PDF. Then someone in another department receives the report but wants to run some comparisons of the "raw data" against something they are tracking in their department. You have to find a way to export the data to them so they don't resort to some flakey OCR application or complain to their boss that they need some special software app because of a "hardship" you are putting them through......

Fortunately in this case, the output is only for my own small business. I just need to provide some information to a 3rd party, but was trying to prevent them from seeing all of my conditional calculations over in the "margins" and was trying to hide the rows that are not empty yet. I think in the future, I will just handle all of my calculations on a separate sheet or will continue with the "print sheet" that self-populates.

Thanks again! 🙂

Bill G.

Reply

Answer 6

Oct 2, 2011 6:51 PM in response to Wm Gardner (Bill is fine)

Bill,

You aren't doing a Screen Capture with the method I outlined. All the text and graphics that begin as vectors stay that way until they hit the printer driver. The Copy in Numbers preserves all the resolution and the Command-N in Preview converts that collection of objects and text to a PDF object, satisfactory for printing at resolution well above screen resolution.

Jerry

Edit...

This method does not work with Charts. There's a bug of sorts in Numbers and it fails to include Chart titles and legends in the Copy to the Clipboard, so they don't appear in the PDF created from the clipboard with Command-New in Preview. This is a long-known issue and I just checked and found that it has not been resolved in Lion.

Jerry

Reply

Answer 7

Dec 31, 2016 5:47 AM in response to Jerrold Green1

Vernars 🙂 thats "very nice" said with a kind of lowish growl. I often forget how simply brilliant preview is. The integration with macOS is lovely. Thanks Jerry that is exactly what I needed as I wanted an image as output. Cheers a million.

Rob

Reply

Answer 8

Yellowbox

Level 7

21,951 points

Dec 31, 2016 7:04 AM in response to Superfulcrum

Hi Rob,

A User Tip written for Numbers 3. it is still applicable to Numbers 4.

Print Layout Guide for Numbers 3 on Mac

Make your own layout guide and Save As Template. There are several steps, but the process is quicker than the explanation! And if you Save As Template, you need only do this once.

Regards,

Ian.

Reply

Answer 9

Dec 31, 2016 6:31 AM in response to Wm Gardner (Bill is fine)

select the cells in question, copy

then select the destination and use the menu item "Edit > Paste Formula Results"

Reply