Print and Preview workbook

After creating a worksheet, you often want to print a hard copy of it. This article explains how to print spreadsheets with Aspose.Cells.

Print Introduction

Microsoft Excel assumes that you want to print the entire worksheet area unless you specify a selection. To print using Aspose.Cells, first import the Aspose.Cells.Rendering namespace to the program. It has several useful classes, for example, SheetRender and WorkbookRender.

Print Using SheetRender

The Aspose.Cells.Rendering.SheetRender class represents a worksheet and has the ToPrinter method which can print a worksheet. The following sample code shows how to print a worksheet.

	// For complete examples and data files, please go to https://github.com/aspose-cells/Aspose.Cells-for-.NET
	// The path to the documents directory.
	string dataDir = RunExamples.GetDataDir(System.Reflection.MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod().DeclaringType);

	// Instantiate a workbook with Excel file.
	Workbook workbook = new Workbook(dataDir + "SampleBook.xlsx");

	string printerName = "";

	while (string.IsNullOrEmpty(printerName) && string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(printerName))
	{
	Console.WriteLine("Please Enter Your Printer Name:");
	printerName = Console.ReadLine();
	}

	// Define a worksheet.
	Worksheet worksheet;

	// Get the second sheet.
	worksheet = workbook.Worksheets[1];

	// Apply different Image/Print options.
	Aspose.Cells.Rendering.ImageOrPrintOptions options = new Aspose.Cells.Rendering.ImageOrPrintOptions();
	options.PrintingPage = PrintingPageType.Default;
	SheetRender sr = new SheetRender(worksheet, options);

	Console.WriteLine("Printing SampleBook.xlsx");
	// Print the sheet.
	try
	{
	sr.ToPrinter(printerName);
	Console.WriteLine("Pinting finished.");
	}
	catch (Exception ex)
	{
	Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
	}

view raw Examples-CSharp-Articles-RenderingAndPrinting-PrintingUsingSheetRender-PrintingExcelWorkbookUsingSheetRender.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Print Using WorkbookRender

To print a whole workbook, iterate through the sheets and print them, or use the WorkbookRender class.

	// For complete examples and data files, please go to https://github.com/aspose-cells/Aspose.Cells-for-.NET
	//Source directory
	string sourceDir = RunExamples.Get_SourceDirectory();

	// Instantiate a workbook with an Excel file.
	Workbook workbook = new Workbook(sourceDir + "samplePrintingUsingWorkbookRender.xlsx");

	string printerName = "doPDF 8";

	// Apply different Image/Print options.
	Aspose.Cells.Rendering.ImageOrPrintOptions options = new Aspose.Cells.Rendering.ImageOrPrintOptions();
	options.ImageType = Drawing.ImageType.Tiff;
	options.PrintingPage = PrintingPageType.Default;

	// To print a whole workbook, iterate through the sheets and print them, or use the WorkbookRender class.
	WorkbookRender wr = new WorkbookRender(workbook, options);

	try
	{
	// Print the workbook.
	wr.ToPrinter(printerName);
	}
	catch (Exception ex)
	{
	Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
	}

view raw Examples-CSharp-Articles-RenderingAndPrinting-PrintingUsingWorkbookRender-1.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Aspose.Cells also provides overloads for the WorkbookRender.ToPrinter() and SheetRender.ToPrinter() methods, so it’s possible to set the print job name while printing Excel spreadsheets. By default, all print jobs are created with the name “Document”.

Print Preview

There may be cases where Excel files with millions of pages need to be converted to PDF or images. Processing such files will consume a lot of time and resources. In such cases, the Workbook and Worksheet Print Preview feature might prove to be useful. Before converting such files, the user can check the total number of pages and then decide whether the file is to be converted or not. This article focuses on using the WorkbookPrintingPreview and SheetPrintingPreview classes to find out the total number of pages.

Aspose.Cells provides the print preview feature. For this, the API provides WorkbookPrintingPreview and SheetPrintingPreview classes. To create the print preview of the whole workbook, create an instance of the WorkbookPrintingPreview class by passing Workbook and ImageOrPrintOptions objects to the constructor. The WorkbookPrintingPreview class provides an EvaluatedPageCount method which returns the number of pages in the generated preview. Similar to WorkbookPrintingPreview class, the SheetPrintingPreview class is used to generate a print preview for a specific worksheet. To create the print preview of a worksheet, create an instance of the SheetPrintingPreview class by passing Worksheet and ImageOrPrintOptions objects to the constructor. The SheetPrintingPreview class also provides an EvaluatedPageCount method which returns the number of pages in the generated preview.

The following code snippet demonstrates the use of both WorkbookPrintingPreview and SheetPrintingPreview classes by using the sample excel file.

Sample Code

	// For complete examples and data files, please go to https://github.com/aspose-cells/Aspose.Cells-for-.NET
	//Source directory
	string sourceDir = RunExamples.Get_SourceDirectory();

	Workbook workbook = new Workbook(sourceDir + "Book1.xlsx");
	ImageOrPrintOptions imgOptions = new ImageOrPrintOptions();
	WorkbookPrintingPreview preview = new WorkbookPrintingPreview(workbook, imgOptions);
	Console.WriteLine("Workbook page count: " + preview.EvaluatedPageCount);

	SheetPrintingPreview preview2 = new SheetPrintingPreview(workbook.Worksheets[0], imgOptions);
	Console.WriteLine("Worksheet page count: " + preview2.EvaluatedPageCount);

view raw Examples-CSharp-Workbook-PrintPreview-1.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The following is the output generated by executing the above code.

Console Output

Workbook page count: 1
Worksheet page count: 1

Advance topics

Protect and Unprotect Manage Document Properties