Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: Printing the Active Document from a Macro.

Printing the Active Document from a Macro

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated April 5, 2021)
This tip applies to Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003

Macros really can make life easier. It is not uncommon to create macros that perform repetitive tasks, and thereby relieve us of the mundane tasks we might otherwise need to perform. It is also not uncommon to need to print out the current document after doing some processing on it. If you find yourself with this need, you can simply let the macro take care of printing the current document. To add this capability to your macros, simply include a line like this:

ActiveDocument.PrintOut Copies:=1

The PrintOut method prints the specified document; in this case, the ActiveDocument object—the document currently selected—is printed. In this particular usage, the Copies argument is used to specify how many copies of the document to print.

When using the PrintOut method, there are quite a few different arguments you can use. Rather than detail all of them, it is probably more useful to just look at some of the more common arguments you can use.

Argument		Meaning
Copies		The number of copies to print.
Pages		The page ranges to print. The ranges are separated by commas and enclosed in quote marks, similar to how you specify page ranges in the Print dialog box.
PrintToFile		Normally False, but you can set it to True if you want output to go to a disk file instead of the printer.
OutputFileName		Only necessary if you set PrintToFile to True. Used to specify the file name of the output file.

Note:

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WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (830) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Printing the Active Document from a Macro.

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. Learn more about Allen...

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What is three more than 3?

2023-08-23 20:08:13

Larry Wilson

For three days I have researched and I have tested using Office 365 in both Win10 and Win11 and using both Excel (to create Word objects) and Word. Regardless whether I look (using the Watch Window) at the created (with "Set") application object (of either type Object or Word.Application) or its component called "Application", I am unable to find "PrintOut". The only thing I see that starts with "Print" is "PrintPreview". I assume I am looking in the wrong place.

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