how do I insert page breaks?

It does not have page breaks. There's not much you can do other than resizing rows or adding empty rows. Or, if possible/practical, you can break your table into several smaller tables and arrange them to be on different pages. The process of splitting a table into smaller tables is simple enough but is not practical if you need it to be one table for formulas, sorting, etc.

I have the impression that printing was not and continues to not be a high priority in the design. You would have liked the glory days of Numbers '09 when there was the wonderful ability to lay out a page in WYSIWYG fashion, until it all got removed in the "new" version because the iPad version didn't do it. There weren't page breaks back then, either, though.

Why is it easier to format "page breaks" in Exel? As a lifelong Mac user, numbers is not intuitive and completely lacking basic features, such as the ability to format a table, in my case a calendar, to fit a month per page. Very disappointing Apple..

Hi bksansoo and Mattodrums,

When I first started Numbers, I brought all my Excel thinking. Then I learned by following posts in this forum that Numbers was never designed to be a clone of Excel.

An Excel sheet has an "ocean" of cells, with small "Islands" of data here and there. Hence the need for page breaks, or "Print Area".

A Numbers sheet is a blank "canvas" upon which we can place objects such as tables, text boxes, graphs, shapes - and drag them around, align them, automatically distribute them. All to fit on one page for printing.

The Numbers approach allows for, maybe, a huge database table on one sheet (not for printing) and one or more "presentation" sheets with, perhaps, summary tables, graphs, and other objects to create an attractive sheet to print.

So, no need for page breaks in the huge database.

Take a look at the Numbers Template Chooser for excellent demonstrations of the way to use Numbers as it was designed.

Regards,

Ian.

Thank you for your reply and your perspective. I understand completely what you’re saying. However, it’s not too much to ask for simple, basic functions. I was given a 20 page two-year calendar for work, it took me far too long, and was incredibly tedious, to manipulate the table so that each month would be on its own page. That could’ve been done in less than a minute in excel. There’s just no excuses. There needs to be a quick, obvious way to format in Numbers so you can manage how a document prints, or how content displayed in a pdf, whichever way you need.

Nine out of ten times Apple products are better designed than Microsoft, “iLife” is the exception where they came up short. (Dating myself with the iLife reference, ha!) i’m not a fan of Microsoft office, it is bad, but this is worse.

Mattodrums wrote:

it’s not too much to ask for simple, basic functions.

We're your fellow users here. To make a suggestion to Apple perhaps you could go to Numbers > Provide Numbers Feedback in your menu.

I agree that printing in Numbers could be better. However, in general I now print things much less than I used to, so it doesn't bother me much.

For precise printing the apps in Microsoft 365 are a good choice. They work really well on the Mac. Perhaps the open source LibreOffice is also good at printing, though I haven't tried it for that.

SG