Question

I’m working with Microsft Office Interop API. My question pertains to Excel.

I wrote a program using Interop API to format Excel documents and then send them to the printer. The problem though is that we occasionally run across files in which people have created a column that spans 65,000+ rows, and all it contains is a formula. The formula only creates output for the first 100 or so rows, and then the remaining appear blank. But, when sent to the printer, it tries to print like 10,000 pages or something because of those formulas.

I first looked for ways to tell Excel to simply not print those ranges. I couldn’t find any setting to ignore those. Second, I thought about ways to do this programatically, but that logic would be pretty round-about and might cause issues with “regular” files that don’t contain formulas like this.

Does anyone know of a good way to have Excel ignore these formulas that equate to nothing?

I’m using Delphi and Office 2007 Interop API.

Answer 1

I don’t know Delphi, but I created a macro to get the last active column by using

With ActiveSheet
    row = .Cells(.Rows.Count, "B").End(xlUp).row
End With

Then with having the row you could try to print the columns you need.

ActiveSheet.Range("A1:" & "D" row).Select
Selection.PrintOut Copies:=1, Collate:=True

Hope that helps!