Workbook Events: Printing - Speach - Alerts

When printing in Excel, one quite frequently makes mistakes. Sometimes the printout does not look as expected and we may waste more paper than necessary. To reduce such outcomes to minimum we can utilize Excel event feature called BeforePrint.

You can use the following workbook event procedure (VBA code) that will - just before printing your worksheet/selection - alert you with speech feature by asking if you are sure that your workbook and the print settings are OK; if not, printing is cancelled.

Private Sub Workbook_BeforePrint(Cancel As Boolean)
 For Each wk In Worksheets  'Make sure that worksheets are recalculated before printing
    wk.Calculate
 Next
 vbOption = MsgBox("Are you sure that all settings are OK and print can be started?", vbYesNo)
 If vbOption = 7 Then   '6=Yes, 7=No
    Cancel = True
    Application.Speech.Speak "Print is cancelled."
'    MsgBox ("Print is cancelled.") 'optional
    Else
        Application.Speech.Speak "Recalculation is completed and now printing takes place."
    End If
End Sub

To implement this procedure, select the Developer tab in the ribbon and select Visual Basic from the menu, then select the View tab>Project Explorer. In VBAProject of your workbook click on ThisWorkbook, then copy the code provided here and paste it into the space located directly under the Workbook field there. Save your workbook as Excel Macro-Enabled Workbook.

Try to print something to see if the event procedure works as intended.

 

How to create Activity Tracker / Timer

If you'd like to keep in Excel the record of your common daily tasks, in terms of disciplined use of your valuable time, then the solution I'm providing here can be helpful. It makes easy recording of duration of any routine daily activities and provides basis for further analysis of any kind.

This is how it looks like in an exemplary edition:

Header/Footer: What can be entered there?

Excel offers the following built-in headers and footers. They can be added to your worksheet easily, with a single mouse click.

However, we're not limited to these options. In fact, you can enter any text/string into your worksheet cell and add it to any part of the header or footer with just one line of VBA code of a macro. E.g., this line will add contents of cell B2 to the left part of a header:

ActiveSheet.PageSetup.LeftHeader=Range("B2").Value

Such a line can be included in the VBA code I'm presenting at the bottom of this post.