You must select all the sheet tabs that you want to print to print continuous page numbers across sheets in Google Sheets. But it’s not like what you do in Excel.
In Excel, we can select multiple sheets not only for printing but also for some other purposes. So, it offers to select the tabs from within the tab bar.
We can use either of the shortcut keys Ctrl or Shift for this. It’s like holding either of the keys and clicking the tabs that we want to select.
Unfortunately, Google Sheets doesn’t have such an option to select multiple sheet tabs.
What is the solution to print sequential page numbers with multiple sheets in a workbook?
Google Sheets offers this feature within the print setup itself.
Here are the steps to print continuous page numbers across sheet tabs in Google Sheets.
Print Settings to Print Continuous Page Numbers Across Sheets
I am taking you straightaway to the settings.
1. Open the Spreadsheet that you want to print. Make sure that you are online on the Sheet.
2. Go to the FILE menu and click Print.
3. On the print settings panel on the right-hand side of your screen, select “Workbook” below “Print”.
4. Under “Selection”, select “All sheets” if you want to print the entire workbook. Else select the individual tabs that you want and click “Apply”.
The following screenshot may help you to apply the above print settings.
We have completed the important steps to print continuous page numbers across sheet tabs in Google Sheets. The rest of the steps are already known to you. Here are them.
5. Click “Headers and footers”.
6. Check the tick mark beside the “Page numbers”.
This way you can get continuous page numbers across sheet tabs in Google Sheets.
Additional Tips – Inserting Page X of Y
The default settings will insert only sequential numbers as page numbers. To format the page numbers to page x of y, you can follow the below steps.
First, take a note of the total number of pages on the top bar. In my case, it’s 3. You may see a different number that depends on the number of pages that you print.
Under “Headers and footers” (please see step # 5 above) in Print settings, click the blue link “EDIT CUSTOM FIELDS”. It’s within the right-side panel.
Now see the below image and subsequent explanations.
In the print preview as above, click on the page number on headers or footers and set the format to page [PageA] of 3.
In my case, the page numbers are in the footer.
Except for the field in square brackets, other values must be manually entered.
The page field [PageA] will be already there. If not, you can get it by clicking the sheet icon as shown in the image above.
This way we can get page x of y in the print output in Google Sheets.
That’s all about how to add continuous page numbers and format them across sheet tabs in Google Sheets.
Thanks for the stay. Enjoy!
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