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Print selected pages or sections of a Word document in any order

Microsoft Word has quite clever options for printing selected pages or document sections in any order you want.

Office Watch has already talked about printing a selection from a document.

Print pages

Word has options to print page combinations other than the default ‘Print All Pages’.

Print Current Page

Use the Print pane preview to scroll to the page you want and choose ‘Print Current Page’.

Custom Print

Custom Print using the Pages: box below the pull-down list. Type in exactly what you want to print.

You can mention page numbers or page sections in the text box to print only specific pages.

Almost any range of pages can be printed with commas separating the pages requested and hyphens indicating a range of pages to print:

  • 3-7 will print pages from 3 to 7 inclusive
  • 1,3,5,7 will print only pages 1, 3, 5 and 7 of the document.
  • 3, 7-11, 13 prints page 3, then 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 plus page 13.

Print from page n to end

You don’t have to know the exact ending page number, any number higher than the total pages in the document will make all the pages until the end print out. Or you can just put a dash with nothing either before or afterwards.

For example, in a 73 page document a page range of 50- will print all the pages from 50 to the end or 50-99 will also work.

Print from page one to page n

Similarly to printing to end: 
-50 will print from the start to page 50.

Of course, 1-50 will do the same thing.

Print in any order

Custom Print lets you print in any order, just enter the pages the order you want them to come out.

  • 7-3 will print pages from 7 then 6 down to  page 3, in that order
  • 5,3,7,1 will print only those pages and in that order.

Print the same page more than once

Enter the same page number more than once and Word will print the page again.

  • 1,1,3 will print page 1 twice than page 3.
  • 1,1,1- will print page 1 twice then the entire document.  Useful if you need multiple copies of the first/cover page.

Print Odd or Even

There are specific options to

  • Print only Odd pages
  • Print only Even pages

Double-sided printed

Handy if you want to manually print double-sided. Print the Odd pages, flip the pages and feed back into the printer for Print Even Pages.  Some printer software has options to do this automatically (ie print odd pages, pause with a message to flip/feed the paper, then print even pages)

Print sections

You can print whole sections of a document if you have inserted section breaks.

Being able to print by sections means you can print from the start until a certain section without knowing the exact page number (which could vary)   s1-s5 will print the first five sections.

Section breaks could match up with chapters so chapter 1 is also section 1 in Word.

  • s7 will print only section 7
  • s5-s7 will print from section 5 to section 7 inclusive
  • p4s5-p7s5 prints section 5 pages 4 to 7 inclusive
  • p4s5-p8s6 prints from section 5 page 4 to section 6 page 8

If your document has sections breaks which match the organization of the document (eg sections = chapters) this can be an effective way to print parts of a document without knowing the page numbers.

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