Printable number chart, 1 to 20

What this sheet holds

The chart sets the whole numbers from 1 to 20, one to a cell, in a grid five columns wide and four rows deep. That is twenty numerals on a single A4 sheet at fifteen point, inside eleven ruled lines: six running down the sheet and five running across it. No other table this press sets is ruled with fewer lines than that.

Nine of the twenty numerals are single digits and the other eleven, 10 to 20, have two. The rows read 1 to 5, 6 to 10, 11 to 15 and 16 to 20.

Taking the sheet

PDF, PNG or SVG, computed in your own browser as you ask for it, with nothing uploaded and nothing kept. The range, the number of columns, the paper, the orientation, empty cells and shaded cells are all settings you can change before taking the file.

Five to a row changes what a column is

Most of the charts here are ten cells wide, and ten is a particular width because we write numbers in tens. On a ten-wide sheet a step down adds ten, so a column is a run of numbers that all end in the same digit, and the last digit repeats forever down the column.

Five to a row is the width that breaks it. A step to the right still adds one, but a step down now adds five, so the first column reads 1, 6, 11, 16 and the last digits alternate rather than repeat: 1, 6, 1, 6. The same happens in every column on the sheet. The second reads 2, 7, 12, 17. The third reads 3, 8, 13, 18. Each is a run of fives, and each carries two different final digits, five apart, turn and turn about.

What the width does hold on to is the right-hand edge. The last cell of each row closes on 5, 10, 15 and 20, so that column is the five times table read from top to bottom, in the same way that the last column of a ten-wide chart is the ten times table. And because 20 is exactly four rows of five, the grid comes out full: no cell is left over at the end, and the bottom right corner is 20.

The same twenty numbers laid ten to a row would come out quite differently. That is two rows, 1 to 10 and 11 to 20, and the columns become pairs: 1 above 11, 2 above 12, with the last digit repeating down each pair as it does on a hundred square. Four rows of five and two rows of ten hold the same twenty numerals; what changes is the depth of the grid and the size of the step from one cell to the one below it. The column count is a setting here, so either arrangement can be had from this sheet.