You’re preparing a sales report in Google Sheets for a team meeting. Your spreadsheet has data for each month of the year. However, when you print it, the data gets split awkwardly, making it hard to read. You can use page breaks so each month’s data starts on a new page.
In this tutorial, we will learn to insert and adjust the page breaks in Google Sheets. So, let’s get started…
Also Read – Hide Gridlines in Google Sheets
Steps to Add Page Breaks in Google Sheets
It’s quite easy to add page breaks in Google Sheets; all you need to do is follow the below steps:
- First, make sure to have data in a well-structured form. No value should be overlapped in the cells. If you think you have long values in any of the cells, you can apply wrap text to move the long text to the next line.
- After that, click on the File menu in the top-left corner. From the drop-down menu, select Print. This will open the print settings window.
- Now, in the print settings window, look for the “SET CUSTOM PAGE BREAKS” option on the right side of the window. Then, click on it to open the page break section.
- Next, in the page break mode, you will see blue lines that show the current page breaks. By default, Google Sheets will automatically determine where the pages break based on the paper’s size and the sheet’s data.
- To move a page break, click and drag the blue line up to that column or row. For example, you can drag the blue line to the end of each customer feedback column to ensure it is included on the page.
- Once you have adjusted the page breaks as you want them, click the Confirm button at the top-right corner of the page break editing mode. This will save your page breaks and return you to the main print settings window.
Returning to the print settings window, you can now see a preview of how your data will look when printed with the new page breaks.
Even if you download your worksheet as a PDF file, the same page break will be present. You can add that to the file, or you can edit page breaks while exporting it.
Now, when you have applied a custom page break, Google Sheets allows you to edit it or turn it off to let Google Sheets use the default page breaks.
When inserting a page break, it is always better to adjust the margins to get the print preview in the print settings.
Note – When you apply page break, it only applies to the current worksheet, not to the entire workbook on the Google Sheets application
Why Can’t I Set Custom Page Breaks?
Custom Page Break is always available in Google Sheets, but there might be a situation when you won’t be able to use this option. Let’s say you have used the set a specific print area option activated; in that case, you won’t be able to set a custom page break.
If you want to print the entire workbook in one go, you won’t be able to use the custom page break option.
Remove a Page Break in Google Sheets
Once you define custom page breaks, there are two ways to remove them: turning them off and resetting them from the page break Window.
In the print setting window, where you have the custom page break option, once you specify a page break, a toggle button appears to turn off or on the breaks you define. You can turn it off when you want to use the default settings from Google Sheets.
The other is to click on the edit button next to the toggle button and then click on the reset button to return to the default settings in Google Sheets.
In the end…
Page break is an amazing option to use when taking printouts of your reports. But there’s one thing I don’t like: it doesn’t show on the worksheet view (when you are working on the data), but when you use Excel, it’s there all the time, and sometimes I have to remove it to clear the view.