Excel – How to show only the print area in Excel and grey out the rest

I used AutoIt to make a script that opens Excel, opens the only file (which begins with "elec") in a specified folder (which begins with "viat"), prints it, closes Excel, then runs a batch file to archive the file it just printed.

Here is the code of the AutoIt script file. I was banging my head on this for a while until I discovered that I needed the Sleep commands to make it work properly.

Run("C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\Excel.exe")
WinWaitActive("Microsoft Excel")
Send("^o")
WinWaitActive("Open")
ControlClick("Open", "", 1148)
Send("c:\viat{DOWN}{ENTER}")
Sleep(1000)
Send("elec")
Sleep(1000)
Send("{DOWN}{ENTER}")
WinWaitActive("Microsoft Excel")
Send("^p")
Sleep(1000)
Send("{ENTER}")
Sleep(1000)
WinClose("Microsoft Excel")
Sleep(1000)
Run(""C:\Users\Chris\Documents\ViaTrack Archives\archiver.bat"")

And here is the code of archiver.bat:

move "C:\ViaTrack Reports\*.*" "C:\Users\Chris\Documents\ViaTrack Archives"

It's extremely simplistic coding, but it gets the job done. The main drawback of this script is that it will cause Excel to throw an error if the file does not exist in the folder. However, it is scheduled to run about an hour after the file is normally emailed to me, to allow for any unexpected delays.

The file is normally emailed at 5:40 AM every weekday. Historically, it's never arrived later than 5:45. Mail Attachment Downloader is set up to check for new attachments every 15 minutes.

It worked just fine this morning. The Billing Department Manager was happy to come in and find that her report was waiting for her on the printer, and she didn't have to print it out herself.

Let each user set their preferred decimal separator for Excel using File > Options > Advanced

Untick "Use system separator" and set the desired separator symbols. This way User A can use a decimal point with a number, and User B, who prefers decimal comma, can open the same file and will see the same numbers with decimal commas.

Excel is international and can cater to these need. It's just a tick in a box. No VBA required.