Prevent printing of documents

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dr. Mevita
  • Start date Start date
D

Dr. Mevita

Is there a way to allow viewing but not printing of a document? This is
useful for documents containing confidential information that are shared with
some others, but you don't want them to be printed & left somewhere.
 
Dr. Mevita said:
Is there a way to allow viewing but not printing of a document? This
is useful for documents containing confidential information that are
shared with some others, but you don't want them to be printed & left
somewhere.
Click to expand...

If all your users are cooperative, you can use a couple of small macros to
intercept the print commands and disable them. If a user is uncooperative,
there's nothing Word can do to prevent printing.

Add these macros (http://www.gmayor.com/installing_macro.htm) to the
document:

Sub FilePrint()
MsgBox "Printing is disabled."
End Sub

Sub FilePrintDefault()
MsgBox "Printing is disabled."
End Sub

The first one intercepts the Print command on the menu and its Ctrl+P
shortcut, and the second one intercepts the Print button on the toolbar.

The drawback is that macros stored in a document always trigger the macro
antivirus mechanism. If the user has set their macro security level to High
or Very High, the macros will be disabled and there won't be any
interception of print commands. You have to request users to set their
security level to Medium and, when a message appears during opening of the
document, to click the Enable button. The only way to avoid this is to
digitally sign the macro project, using a security certificate. That's an
expensive alternative to simply asking users not to print the documents.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
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