Printing an unknown amount of pages

[dexter30]

Hi.

I have a huge batch of documents. On every page of every batch I have to print a stamp (image) and a sequential number inside the stamp.

This part I was able to solve by inserting the image and the starting number centered in the rightmost cell of the first row. Then I duplicated this row 1000 times (cause no document has more than this amount of pages), increasing the number by 1 and mantaining the image. Then I inserted (automatically via macro) a page break on every row.

This way I can print up to 1000 times a page with a stamp and a sequence number.

The problem is, every batch of documents has a diferent and unknown beforehand number of pages. I have to count how many pages there are
so I can go to Print Window and set this amount of copies to be printed.

I wish there was a way to do it without having to count the pages before printing. One way would be to set copies to a high number (1000 or so), and put the document alone in the printer tray. After printing the last
page (e.g 85) the printer would issue the message "out of paper". Then you would have to cancel the print. But this way is unelegant and nothing practical.

Maybe there is a better way of doing this?

Any ideas will be welcome.

Thanks.

 

[xenou]

It makes me think of real life printing presses ... which *would* stop when the paper is out.

Printers are really separate devices from Excel. I know almost nothing about them. It sounds like you'd have to intercept the print queue and clear it when the printer reports that it is out of paper, or just arbitrarily do so after a set period of time. Not very pretty either. I think I'd probably be satisfied with ad hoc solutions (such as just guessing how many pages to print). If you do it a lot you might be able to establish guidelines for a half-way decent count based on the height of the stack.