I love LibreOffice and OpenOffice both for helping me escape from the clutches of Microsoft Office. I have donated to LibreOffice as a measure of gratitude for helping me run my business and indeed my life. Sadly, no technology product seems impervious to silly problems, and I encountered one today with LibreOffice that made me scream in frustration.

The Symptom

I have a workbook with 7 worksheets. I wanted to print only the 6th worksheet. I did this:

  1. Deselect all the worksheets.
  2. Select only the 6th worksheet.
  3. Press Cmd+P for “Print…”.

The miniature print preview dialog did not show me the sheet that I want to print, but instead, the last sheet, quite arbitrarily. I tried selecting all the available options for choosing which parts of the workbook to print (“Select all sheets”, “Print only current selection”…), but I could only print the last sheet. I felt like this print dialog was mocking me.

The Fix

Clear all the print ranges, because some arbitrary sequence of commands from the past that you didn’t notice managed to set the print range on some of your sheets to “none” or “empty”. Obviously.

Some Details

I have no idea why any print range was set on any sheet in this workbook at any point. Sadly, none of that matters; it suffices to know that the print range for a given worksheet filters what you can choose to print from the print dialog, so if you can’t print what you want to print, then you should check the print ranges.

I did this:

  1. Select all the sheets.
  2. Choose Format > Print Ranges > Clear. (If “Clear” is not available to select, then you have a different problem, and I don’t know what that is.)
  3. Deselect all the sheets.
  4. Try printing again.

Success!

Reference

“Calc Will Not Print All Sheets in spreadsheet”. A forum discussion that gave me the idea to check for unexpectedly-set print ranges. Thank you, William Whalley, for noticing the cause of the unexpected behavior.