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.

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


1

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:

  1. Display the folder that contains all the documents you want to print.
  2. Create a selection set of the documents you want to print. (Select them all, using Ctrl and Shift to help put the selection set together.)
  3. Right-click on one of the selected workbooks. Windows displays a Context menu.
  4. Choose Print from the Context menu.

Excel is automatically started and each workbook is printed, in turn. You can also apply a variation on this approach:

  1. Display the Open dialog box. (In Excel 2007 and Excel 2010, just press Ctrl+O. In Excel 2013 press Ctrl+O and then click Computer | Browse.) In later versions of Excel press Ctrl+ O and then click Browse.
  2. Using the controls in the dialog box, display the folder that contains the workbooks you want to print.
  3. Create a selection set of the workbooks you want to print.
  4. Right-click the selection set and choose Print from the resulting Context menu.

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.

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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What is eight minus 3?

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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