Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Printing Workbooks in a Folder.
Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated January 24, 2025)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021
Have you collected a bunch of workbooks in a folder, and you want to print all of them at once? There are a couple of quick and easy ways you can do this. The first method involves the use of Windows, not Excel. Follow these general steps:
Excel is automatically started and each workbook is printed, in turn. You can also apply a variation on this approach:
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (11166) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Printing Workbooks in a Folder.
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2021-01-16 22:36:18
Roy
Yeah... no workee, the doing it from the File|Open function. Always founders after the first printing saying there's a dialog box open.
Fine from Explorer though if the order they print in is important to you, you must select them in that order... AND EVEN THEN, the one you want printed FIRST has to be selected LAST.
That's a problem with anything you select in Explorer. It feeds through into any Office program, maybe into non-MS programs too. (I'm sure it does, it's just I don't use any in which I can test the thought since, for example, I only use Excel, not, say, Google's spreadsheet too, and most, say, accounting programs don't really have functionality that's affected.)
The problem is that the first thing selected acts as the end of the list, period. So set up a range in Excel that you want a user to select for his input (he sees a thing with selections, you work the magic in the background) and it selects the seven, say, cells he is allowed to edit with the starting one selected all ready for him to go... to do that, you have to build the range in order selecting that first, starting position cell last. Not first as you'd think.
Same thing here. Six files to print and order matters? Select them in the order you want except select the first to be printed last. So file 1-6 to be printed 2,4,6,3,5,1 would have to be selected in this order: 4,6,3,5,1,2.
Office 365, up to date when adding this comment, as regards "What version?" where the dialog box error is concerned. But I have tried this a few times over the years, since the early 90's when MS began touting the concept along with dragging a file icon onto a printer icon to print things. It's always had this issue, in my experience, as well as the "select the first to print (or 'to whatever') last" issue.
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Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here:
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