Automatic Printing To A PDF

how to print automatically from Excel to a PDF file. After a couple of days of searching and tweaking, I've got what I think is a fairly good solution for automating your printing of worksheets to PDF files.

This solution requires the use of PDF995. This is a free utility available at www.PDF995.com. This is a print driver that allows you to print to a PDF file. The file is compatible with Adobe and can be read with the Adobe reader like any other PDF. The free version does pop-up some advertising with each print, but the automation works with around the pop-ups. I believe the full license version is about $10 and doesn't produce the pop-ups.

The challenge in automating a PDF process is that the PDF driver will prompt the user for a filename. This is ok if you are printing just one sheet, but if you need to automate the production of several PDFs, you need to be able to specify the name of the file in the code. The subroutine SheetToPDF presented below allows you to specify a single worksheet and the full filename for the PDF. I've included all the code and external declarations needed. The two subs at the bottom give examples of how to call SheetToPDF with the passed parameters.

'Needed to Read INI file settings
Declare Function GetPrivateProfileString Lib "kernel32" Alias _
"GetPrivateProfileStringA" (ByVal lpApplicationName As String, _
ByVal lpKeyName As Any, ByVal lpDefault As String, _
ByVal lpReturnedString As String, ByVal nSize As Long, _
ByVal lpFileName As String) As Long

'Needed to Write INI file settings
Declare Function WritePrivateProfileString Lib "kernel32" Alias _
"WritePrivateProfileStringA" (ByVal lpApplicationName As String, _
ByVal lpKeyName As Any, ByVal lpString As Any, _...........................