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Printing Limited Pages from a Range of Worksheets

Summary: If you only want to print a couple of pages from a large number of worksheets, you may be out of luck. Excel just doesn't make it that easy to do. You can, however, use a simple macro that will do the printing for you. (This tip works with Microsoft Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, Excel 2003, and Excel 2007.)

Ian puts together Excel workbooks that typically contain, at minimum, 30 worksheets. Each worksheet, if printed, requires a minimum of eight pages. Ian often updates data in each worksheet that would appear on the first two printed pages of those worksheets. When it comes time to print, Ian would like a way to print just the first two pages of each worksheet.

When you select a range of worksheets and then choose to print, those worksheets are considered by Excel to be a single, contiguous print job. So, for instance, if you selected 20 worksheets and each worksheet required eight pages, that would not be treated by Excel as 20 individual print jobs of eight pages each, but as a single 160-page print job.

Theoretically you could specify, in the Print dialog box, that you wanted to print pages 1, 2, 9, 10, 17, 18, etc., but this is prone to error and quite tedious. It gets even more difficult if the worksheets being printed consist of varying numbers of pages.

The best solution is to write a macro that will do the printing for you. The macro can step through however many worksheets you've selected and print only the first two pages of each of those worksheets. The following macro implements this technique:

Sub PrintTwoPages()
    Dim sht As Variant

    For Each sht In ActiveWindow.SelectedSheets
        sht.PrintOut From:=1, To:=2, Preview:=True
    Next
    Set sht = Nothing
End Sub

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (3279) applies to Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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