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