Printing Only Selected Pages

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:

Choose the Print option from the File menu, or simply press Ctrl+P. Word displays the Print dialog box. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Print dialog box.

In the Pages box, indicate the page numbers you want to print.
Click on OK.

When you specify page numbers, Word allows you quite a bit of flexibility. The following are some general guidelines for specifying page numbers:

You can specify a single page number.
You can specify a group of non-sequential pages by separating them by commas, i.e., 4, 8, 19.
You can specify a sequential range of pages by putting a dash between them. Thus, 4-7 would print pages 4 through 7.
You can print an entire section by using s. For instance, to print section 5 of your document, you would use s5.
You can print multiple sections the same as you would print multiple pages. For example, s2, s6 would print sections 2 and 6.
You can specify pages within a section by using s and p with page numbers. For instance, if you want to print pages 2 through 7 of section 4, you would use p2s4-p7s4.
You can specify a range of pages across sections in the same manner. To print beginning with page 2 of section 4 and ending with page 5 of section 7 you would use p2s4-p5s7.

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.

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 eight minus 5?

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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