How to set a print area in Numbers

Question

This one should be easy: set print range for the cells that require to be printed. There does not to be a way to do it, or is it so obvious that I missed it?

Answer 1

Okay, I've been following this conversation, can't keep my mouth shut.
For what it's worth, I spend about 90% of my work day in excel and while I'm no power user by any means, I'm reasonably competent in it. I think in spreadsheets. It's a curse. I've used every spreadsheet there is that will run on a Mac, and none has even come close to excel's usefulness. Yes, that includes all the third-party attempts that claim to be business-ready. They're just not, and neither is Numbers.
Crazierthanu, I think excel can at least manage all of the issues you listed. For global settings you can select all the tabs you want to change and any change you make on one will be made on all of the selected tabs. So if you set Portrait and Fit to Page in page setup, all the tabs will print in Portrait and the data fitted to a single sheet. The downside to this is when there are different "sizes" of data on the various tabs; that can result in varying font sizes, another problem. Again in excel (I choose not to capitalize microsoft product names, call it a personal quirk born of extreme disgust with the company), in print view one can, with a few keyboard shortcuts, select the area to be printed and set print area from the context menu. It's very straightforward. And you can select any part of the data to print, eschewing all else. This is how you'd print non-rectangular areas. You can use this function to print discontinuous areas also, though they'll print on separate pages. To print multiple tabs at one time, select each tab you wish to print while holding down Ctnl or Shift.
Anyway. I sure don't want to sound like an excel supporter because I've put myself through a lot of suffering to avoid having to buy it. And I still haven't. I'll go a long way to keep M$ from getting any of my money. But excel is a good spreadsheet, the best there is so far. Printing should be simple. Maybe M$ patented excel's printing paradigm and no one else can use any of it. That would be par.
Many of these items are possible in Numbers. What's so frustrating is the screwy slider that makes you print the whole sheet and everything on it. I don't want to print everything on a sheet, and I want to easily select paper orientation (I think someone mentioned how to do that and I'd bet it would work globally by selecting multiple sheets in the left column).
I too think Nick hit it on the head when he said that you have to compromise sheet layout to fit within Numbers' print paradigm. That's just ridiculous. The application needs to bend to my will just a bit more than that.
Because I've invested a great deal of hope and what to me is not an insignificant amount of money, I'll learn to use Numbers. But Apple sure missed the boat with this one if they hoped to get excel users to switch. Unless they have a serious personal vendetta against microsoft, pretty much any spreadsheet user in the world will scoff at this first generation attempt and continue using excel. You can sure make "pretty" spreadsheets with Numbers, but it's awful hard to get any work out of it.
I've printed the Numbers manual and maybe I'll learn what I need to know from reading it. Heaven knows I've read enough excel books! Maybe that's what the first version of Numbers needs - someone to figure out how to use it and write a book for the rest of us. Hey, maybe that can be my retirement fund!