How to prevent cell contents from printing in Excel?

In some cases, when you print a worksheet, you may not want to print some cell contents, here this tutorial is talking about several ways to prevent certain cell content from printing in Excel.

Prevent cell contents from printing by changing the Font color

Prevent cell contents from printing by hiding

Prevent cell contents from printing by Kutools for Excel

Prevent cell contents from printing by changing the Font color

To prevent cell content from printing, you can changing the Font color of the cell so that it cannot be seen when printing.

1. Select the cells you won’t print, and then click Home > Font Colors, then select the color which is the same with your background color from the list. See screenshot:

Here my background is white, I select white font color. Now you can see my data as below screenshot shown:

2. Now you can click File or Office Button > Print to preview the worksheet.

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Prevent cell contents from printing by hiding

There are some ways can help you hide the cell contents and then won’t be printed.

Method 1 Format cells as "";"";"";""

1. Select the cells you won’t print, and right click to select Format Cells from the context menu.

2. In the Format Cells dialog, under Number tab, click Custom from the list of Category, the type "";"";"";"" into text box of Type in the right section. See screenshot:

3. Click OK, now the cell contents have been hidden

Method 2 Right click to hide the whole column or row

If you won’t print a whole column or row, you can click at the row header or column header to select the whole row or column, then right click to select Hide from the context menu. See screenshot:

Method 3 Use Group to hide the whole column or row

1. Select the column or row you want to hide, and then click Data > Group. See screenshot:

2. Then a Group dialog pops, if you want to hide rows, check Rows option, if you want hide columns, check Columns option, and click OK.

Note: If you select the entire columns or entire rows to group, just skip this step.

3. Then check the minus button to hide the columns or rows. See screenshots:

Prevent cell contents from printing by Kutools for Excel

After free installing Kutools for Excel, please do as below:

1. Click Kutools Plus > Printing Tools > Print Multiple Selection Wizard. See screenshot:

2. In the popped out dialog, click the plus button to add a selection to print. See screenshot:

3. Then a dialog is popping for you to select selections, you can press Ctrl key to select multiple selections at once time. See screenshot:

4. Click OK, then you can see the multiple selections are added into the Range to print, now click Next. See screenshot:

4. Then in the Step 2 of 3 dialog, check the print setting option you need, then click Next.

5. In the last step, select the option you need, here I just select Active the worksheet, but don’t print it, click Finish.

Now, it will create a new worksheet in the front of all sheets to show all ranges you selected in Step 1 of 3 dialog, and print it. See screenshot:

Tip: Maybe in sometimes, the data is not in order, you can drag it to the location you need, then print it. Click here for more details on Print Multiple Selection Wizard.

Prevent Cell Contents From Printing

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