Printing Only Selected Rows from a Table

Michael has a table that is quite long. One column of the table contains coding characters such as the letters c, b, x, etc. He wonders if there is a way when he prints the table to only print those rows that have a specific coding character in the column. For instance, he may want to print only those rows that contain the code "c" in the coding column.

There are a couple of approaches you could use to tackle this problem. Perhaps the easiest method would be to copy the table to an Excel worksheet and then filter the data based on the characters in the coding column. You can then print the filtered worksheet and have just what you want.

Of course, there may be times when working in Excel instead of Word is not practical or desirable. For instance, you might not have Excel or you may have formatting needs that exceed what Excel can provide. In that case, you could simply sort your table in Word based on the contents of the coding column. Then, select those table rows that contain the code you want printed (they should all be contiguous since you sorted the table) and choose to print. When specifying what to print, however, print only the selection.

Another possible approach is to use your table as the data source for a mail merge. I won't go into the exact steps to use when designing the mail merge (they've been covered in other WordTips), but you can specify that the merge include only those that have the desired character in the coding column.

Finally, if you need to do this selective printing quite often, you may want to create a macro to handle the task. The easiest way to do this is for the macro to create a new document and copy the desired rows to that document.

Sub CopyTableRows()
    Dim SourceDoc As Document
    Dim r As Row
    Dim iCol As Integer
    Dim sPCode As String
    Dim sTemp As String

    iCol = 3        ' Set the coding column
    sPCode = "C"    ' Set code to select (must be uppercase)

    ScreenRefresh = False

    Set SourceDoc = ActiveDocument      ' Get active document's name
    Documents.Add       ' Create a new document

    ' Find all rows that have correct code in the coding column
    For Each r In SourceDoc.Tables(1).Rows
        sTemp = UCase(r.Cells(iCol).Range)
        sTemp = Left(sTemp, Len(sTemp) - 2)     ' Remove cell overhead
        
        If sTemp = sPCode Then
            r.Range.Copy
            Selection.PasteAndFormat wdFormatOriginalFormatting
        End If
    Next r

    ScreenRefresh = True
End Sub

In order to use the macro, you need to make sure that iCol is set to the column used as your coding column and that sPCode contains the code you want to choose. (This should be all uppercase.) When the macro is done, you'll have a document that contains only the rows you want to print, and you can then print that document.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (3511) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021.