How to Print from Google Docs, Sheets and Slides at Home

Shared school projects, a club newsletter, a rental checklist or a CV that lives in Google Drive: sooner or later someone needs a paper copy. Knowing how to print from Google Docs properly saves the usual frustrations, such as a table cut off at the edge, a document that looks fine on screen but prints squashed, or a browser that downloads a PDF when you expected the print window. This guide covers Docs first, then Sheets and Slides, then phones and Chromebooks.

The basic method in a browser

Google’s own help page describes the core steps, and they are the same on Windows, macOS and ChromeOS:

1. Open the document in Google Docs.
2. Choose File, then Print. In Chrome you can also press Ctrl+P (Windows, ChromeOS) or Cmd+P (Mac).
3. The print window that opens belongs to your browser. Pick the printer, the pages, the number of copies and any options such as colour or two-sided printing.
4. Select Print.

The printer does not need to “know” Google Docs. Docs prepares the pages and the browser hands them to whatever printer is installed on the computer, so if your printer prints from other programs it will print from Docs. If it does not appear in the list, that is a computer setup problem rather than a Docs problem.

Set up the page before you print

The most common reason a Google Doc prints badly is that the page settings were never set. Do this first:

Pages or pageless

Google Docs has two formats. Pages shows page breaks, headers and footers like a word processor. Pageless is one long continuous page, which is pleasant on screen but has no fixed page size. Google says pageless documents can still be printed, but the print preview may look different: images are resized to fit the page width and wide tables are shrunk to fit. Headers, footers, watermarks and footnotes that were added while the document was in pages format still print, even though you cannot see them in pageless view.

If you care how the printout looks, switch to pages: File, Page setup, Pages, OK. You can switch back to pageless afterwards.

Paper size, orientation and margins

In File, Page setup (with Pages selected) you can set:

• Paper size: choose Letter or A4 to match the paper actually loaded in your printer. A document set up for one size and printed on the other is the classic cause of slightly cut-off footers or extra white space. Our guide to fit to page vs actual size explains what the scaling options do when the sizes do not match.
• Orientation: landscape suits wide tables. Google notes that a single document can mix portrait and landscape sections.
• Margins: most home printers cannot print right to the edge, so very small margins risk text being clipped.

Set as default applies these settings to new documents, which is useful if all your printing is on one paper size.

Options in the print window

Once you press Print, the browser shows its own settings. Look for:

• Pages: print a range such as 2-4, or only the current page, instead of the whole file.
• Colour: choose black and white for text documents to save colour ink; our article on printing with only black ink explains what that does and does not save.
• Two-sided: if the printer has automatic duplex it appears here; otherwise see how to print double sided for the manual method.
• Pages per sheet: handy for proofreading drafts; the details are in how to print multiple pages on one sheet.
• Scale: leave it at default or 100% unless something is cut off.

Printing from Firefox or Safari: the automatic PDF

Google’s help page says that in Firefox or Safari, printing a document or a presentation downloads a PDF automatically instead of opening the print window. That is expected behaviour, not an error. Open the downloaded PDF, then use the PDF viewer’s File, Print. If you would rather keep a PDF copy anyway, our guide on how to print to PDF covers saving and sharing it.

The same route works for other formats: File, Download lets you save the document as a Word file, PDF and more, which you can then open and print in another program.

Printing Google Sheets

Spreadsheets need a little more care because they rarely fit a page by accident:

1. Open the spreadsheet and choose File, Print.
2. Sheets opens its own print settings first. Here you can choose what to print (the current sheet, the whole workbook or a selected range), the paper size, orientation, scale and margins.
3. Use the scale option to fit the content to the page width if columns spill onto extra pages.
4. Select Next, choose your printer settings and print.

The ideas are the same as in Excel, so our guide to printing an Excel spreadsheet on one page is a useful companion for headers that repeat on each page and other layout tricks.

Printing Google Slides

Slides offers three useful layouts:

• One slide per page: File, Print, as it is.
• Handouts: in Print settings and preview, choose Handout and the number of slides per page. Google mentions choosing landscape for handouts.
• Slides with speaker notes: in Print settings and preview, choose 1 slide with notes.

Slides with dark backgrounds use a lot of ink. If the printout is only for reference, the black and white option in the print window or a handout layout keeps ink use down.

Printing from a phone or tablet

The Google Docs, Sheets and Slides apps can print too. Open the file, open the app’s menu and look under the share and export options for Print. The app passes the job to your phone’s own print system: AirPrint on an iPhone or iPad, and the default print service or a manufacturer’s plugin on Android. If the printer does not appear, the problem is between the phone and the printer; see printing from an iPhone or printing from an Android phone.

On a Chromebook, Docs prints through ChromeOS, so the printer must be added in the Chromebook’s settings first. Our guide to printing from a Chromebook covers that.

Common problems and quick fixes

• A table runs off the edge: switch to Pages, choose landscape for that section, or narrow the columns.
• An almost empty last page: a stray blank paragraph or page break at the end of the document; delete it and check the preview again.
• Comments do not print: the print output shows the document text, not the comment sidebar. If you need comments on paper, copy them into the document, or download it as a Word file (File, Download), which keeps comments, and print it from a word processor that shows them.
• Text looks too small: the scale in the print window may be set below 100%, or the document may be pageless with a wide table forcing everything to shrink.
• Colours print grey: the print window is set to black and white, or the printer driver has a grayscale default.

A quick checklist before you press Print

Check the format is Pages, the paper size matches the paper in the tray, the page range is right, and the preview has no cut-off content. For long documents, print one page first. That two-minute habit catches nearly every problem before it wastes a stack of paper and ink.