Preventing Users from Printing a Workbook

Perhaps you want to prevent users from printing your workbook—and probably having it end up in a recycling bin or left on a desk somewhere in plain sight. Using Excel’s Before Print event, you can stop them in their tracks. Enter the following code, as before, into the VBE:

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Private Sub workbook_BeforePrint(Cancel As Boolean)
Cancel = True
MsgBox "Sorry, you cannot Print from this workbook", vbInformation
End Sub
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Press Alt/ -Q when you’re done entering the code to get back to Excel, then save your workbook. Now each time users try to print from this workbook, nothing will happen. The MsgBox line of code is optional, but it’s always a good idea to include it to at least inform users so that they do not hassle the IT department, saying there is a problem with their program! If you want to prevent users from printing only particular sheets in your workbook, use this similar code instead:

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Private Sub workbook_BeforePrint(Cancel As Boolean)
Select Case ActiveSheet.Name
Case "Sheet1", "Sheet2"
Cancel = True
MsgBox "Sorry, you cannot print this sheet from this workbook", _
vbInformation
End Select
End Sub
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Notice you’ve specified “Sheet1” and “Sheet2” as the only cases in which printing should be stopped. Of course, these can be the names of any sheets in your workbook; to add more sheets to the list, simply type a comma fol-lowed by the sheet name in quotation marks. If you need to prevent the printing of only one sheet, supply just that one name in quotes and drop the comma.