Can you prevent parts of a Word document from printing?

We currently prepare detailed technical specifications using an application called "Help & Manual", but for various reasons I would like to switch to Word 2012.



One useful feature of "Help & Manual" is that in the navigation pain you can quickly mark sections as "do not print". These are then skipped when the whole document is printed to .pdf.

This is a useful feature as we can include detailed notes, tables, diagrams etc for our own use safe in the knowledge that they won't appear in published documents.

I'm sure there must be a way to achieve this in Word, perhaps using Styles or Sections, but I haven't found one yet.

Any suggestions would be gratefully received.

Thanks,
Mark

To my knowledge, not as you suggest. However, you can specify the pages you want printed (as the print menu offers) by number, range of page numbers, etc.

On the flip side, if you have a professional version of Adobe Acrobat, you can print the MSWord file to .pdf then, once converted, delete the pages that you do not want included. I do not think the Adobe Reader has that option.

Just my view...

Hi Mark,

Word 2012?

To see how to hide certain portions of a document at print time, check out my Microsoft Word Date Calculation Tutorial, at:
http://windowssecrets.com/forums/sho...ation-Tutorial
or
http://www.gmayor.com/downloads.htm#Third_party
In particular, look at the item titled 'Show or hide instructions & graphics at print time'. Do read the document's introductory material.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Hi Paul,

Many thanks for the response.

I meant Word 2010 - getting ahead of myself with 2012...

I had a good look at your "Show or hide instructions & graphics at print time" and they are certainly a good step in the right direction!

I need to make the process more user friendly though:
1. Ideally our technical authors would be able to select a paragraph or section and make all of it hidden when printing. I'm wondering if this could be done with a "Style" or a macro?
2. The text to be 'hidden-on-printing' also needs to be easily editable. With the method you outlined the author appears to be able to edit the text simply by selecting and editing in the normal way. However when the field is next updated it of course reverts back to the original contents.

Hope this makes sense. Any tips gratefully appreciated.

Thanks,
Mark

Hi Mark,

To edit the field, you can simply press Alt-F9 to expose the field code before editing, then Alt-F9, F9 when you're done.

You can't use a Style for what you're after, though you could format the text as hidden. The problem with that, though, is that the display and printing of hidden text is controlled at the application level, not at the document level, so you'd have no control over what gets seen or printed by a particular user.

You could use a macro. This typically entails using either a bookmark or some other form of marker to delineate the instructions. Bookmarks are fragile, being susceptible to accidental deletion, truncation or exapnsion. Instead, you could use a table or Section breaks to delineate the instructions. A table is probably the simplest to implement. A potential problem with macros is that your users must allow them to run, a decision they make when opening the document, or which they might make by configuring Word to never allow them to run. If they don't allow the macro to run, everything will be printed.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]