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Converting to Octal

Filtering Columns for Unique Values

Printing Multiple Worksheets on a Single Page

Changing the Default Font

Creating a Drawing Object

Determining a Value of a Cell

Understanding Macros

 

Locking the Print Area

Summary: Excel allows you to specify an area of your worksheet that should be printed. Here's how to "lock" that area so it cannot be changed. (This tip works with Microsoft Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, Excel 2003, and Excel 2007.)

Karolyne shares workbooks with other people. Once in a while those people will, without knowing it, make changes to a worksheet that results in many, many pages being printed. Karolyne is looking for a way to set a print area in such a way that it is "locked" and could not be changed or removed.

There are a couple of things you can try. First, you can set your print area and then apply worksheet protection that allows only some of the cells in the worksheet to be selected. This will preclude those strange changes that result in huge printouts. It won't, however, stop someone from changing the print area so it includes only those unprotected cells.

The only way to "protect" the print area is to use a macro that will force the desired print area. One natural place to enforce this is just before printing. The following event handler (added to the ThisWorkbook module) will change the print area for worksheet Sheet1 to the range A1:C25:

Private Sub Workbook_BeforePrint(Cancel As Boolean)
    Worksheets("Sheet1").PageSetup.PrintArea = "A1:C25"
End Sub

This approach will only work, obviously, if the user enables macros when the workbook is opened. You can change the specified sheet name and range as desired.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (3847) applies to Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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