Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Excel 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Excel, click here: Specifying a Print Tray for a Worksheet.

Specifying a Print Tray for a Worksheet

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated January 22, 2022)
This tip applies to Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003


Venus has a workbook with twelve worksheets, one for each month. She wants to set it up so that the worksheets for January, April, July, and October print from a different paper tray than the other worksheets.

Unfortunately, there is no way to do this in Excel. Even in a macro there is no way to choose different paper trays. (This has been covered in other issues of ExcelTips.) The only possible solution is rather convoluted. You would need to do the following:

  1. In Windows, set up a printer definition for each paper tray you would be using. Thus, if your printer had four paper trays, you would have four printers defined, each using a different paper tray.
  2. In Excel, create a macro that printed individual worksheets to the appropriate tray-associated printers. Thus, you would have the macro print the worksheets for January, April, July, and October from tray 2 and the rest of the worksheets print from tray 1.

This sounds like a lot of work (it can be), but once it is set up it will work just fine on your system. The problem comes in if you want the same functionality on other systems in your office. The printer definitions are local to the machine on which they are defined, so you would need to define the multiple printers on every system and make sure they were named consistently. The macro would be stored with the workbook, so whoever had access to the workbook could use the macro to do the printing on the desired printers.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (3177) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Specifying a Print Tray for a Worksheet.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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