Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365. 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 Selected Worksheets.

Printing Selected Worksheets

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated November 20, 2023)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365


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If you have a lot of workbooks that have accumulated over the years, you may have a need to print some of the worksheets out of each of them. For instance, you might have a folder that contains a workbook for each of your company's divisions for the previous decade. If your company has eight divisions, that means you have 80 workbooks in the folder. Now, if you need to print the second-quarter and third-quarter figures (from the second and third worksheets out of each workbook), you start to see the problem. Loading each workbook and then printing selected sheets could take a huge amount of time.

A quicker way is to create a macro that will do the printing for you. The following macro starts by asking you for a directory path. Provided that you specify a path, the macro then starts to load each workbook file in the directory, and then prints the second and third worksheet from each one. (The macro doesn't really care what type of workbook files are in the directory—they could be XLS, XLSX, or XLSM files. It should load them all.) Once printed, the workbook is closed.

Public Sub PrintWorkbooks()
    Dim sCurFile As String
    Dim sPath As String

    'Get the path
    sPath = InputBox("Starting path?", "PrintWorkbooks")
    If sPath <> "" Then
        On Error Resume Next
        Application.ScreenUpdating = False
        If Right(sPath, 1) <> "\" Then
            sPath = sPath & "\"
        End If
        sCurFile = Dir(sPath & "*.xls*", vbNormal)
        Do While Len(sCurFile) <> 0
            Workbooks.Open sPath & sCurFile, , True
            With Workbooks(sCurFile)
                .Worksheets(2).PrintOut
                .Worksheets(3).PrintOut
                .Close SaveChanges:=False
            End With
            sCurFile = Dir
            DoEvents
        Loop
        Application.ScreenUpdating = True
        On Error GoTo 0
    End If
End Sub

Obviously, if you have quite a few workbooks in the directory, printing could take quite some time. You may want to find some time when you have nothing else to do, and then just let the macro start running.

Note:

If you would like to know how to use the macros described on this page (or on any other page on the ExcelTips sites), I've prepared a special page that includes helpful information. Click here to open that special page in a new browser tab.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (11316) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Printing Selected Worksheets.

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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Comments

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What is one less than 9?

2023-11-23 10:15:45

J. Woolley

@Warwick W
Here is another reference about Auto_Open and Workbook_Open: https://excelribbon.tips.net/T008451_Running_a_Procedure_when_a_Workbook_is_Opened.html


2023-11-22 11:55:50

J. Woolley

@Warwick W
I suggest carefully reading this before messing with AutomationSecurity:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/excel.application.automationsecurity
You might look for a Workbook_Open event procedure in the ThisWorkbook module or an Auto_Open macro somewhere.
See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/automatically-run-a-macro-when-opening-a-workbook-1e55959b-e077-4c88-a696-c3017600db44
and https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/record-a-macro-to-open-specific-workbooks-when-excel-starts-4342eef5-19ee-435a-b401-1817941b24f5


2023-11-21 04:16:08

Warwick W

Sometime in the last year (I suspect when I upgraded to Excel in Ofice 365) the opening of a macro-enabled workbook (.xlsm) executes the program contained in that workbook, which was quite confusing until I worked out what was happening.
The fix is to set the AutomationSecurity value to disabled such as:

Dim secAutomation as mso.AutomationSecurity ' storage for original value
secAutomation = Application.AutomaticSecurity 'Save original value for restoration afterwards.
Application.AutomaticSecurity = msoAutomationSecurityForceDisable 'Disable automatic execution of .xlsm files

{coding to process the files}

Application.AutomaticSecurity = secAutomation ' Restore original to not screw anything else up

This does not affect the reading of non-macro-enabled workbooks so the same code can be used for all types of workook.


2019-01-17 11:24:54

Gary

Great macro Alan! How would you change it if you wanted to print-to-file instead, say one giant PDF with everything?

Thank you!


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