Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated January 1, 2022)
This tip applies to Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003
Word gives you complete control over how it prints your document. You can either print the entire document or you can print a portion of it. To print only selected pages, follow these steps:
Figure 1. The Print dialog box.
When you specify page numbers, Word allows you quite a bit of flexibility. The following are some general guidelines for specifying page numbers:
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (1065) 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 Only Some Pages.
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2022-01-04 12:32:18
Jonathan Landon
One caution about printing only selected pages. A few years back, I had a HUGE printing project to print on a *shared* printer. We had used Word Mail Merge to draw address information from an Access database to address 400 envelopes for a mass mailing.
In order to reduce the impact on others (not tie up the printer as long), I used the steps above to send the envelopes 20 at a time to the printer, with the idea that - in the pauses between my print jobs - the jobs that others had sent could be printed, and nobody would be excessively delayed.
The printer server bogged WAY down and slowed everybody's work. It appeared that Word was sending the whole document each time to the printer, with instructions for the PRINTER to select the specified pages for printing. I'm not certain that's what was happening, but that's my educated guess.
What I figured out was that when I have very large files, it went much smoother if I would break the document into multiple files for printing.
I recognize that this has the potential to cause other problems. For example, if you were using automatic page numbering, you'd have to go into each separate file and set the starting number, in order to keep them sequential. In this case, since they were envelopes for a mass mailing, that wasn't a n issue.
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