Is there a way to allow viewing but not printing of a document?  This is 
useful for documents containing confidential information that are shared with 
some others, but you don't want them to be printed & left somewhere.

Dr. Mevita wrote:
> Is there a way to allow viewing but not printing of a document?  This
> is useful for documents containing confidential information that are
> shared with some others, but you don't want them to be printed & left
> somewhere.

If all your users are cooperative, you can use a couple of small macros to 
intercept the print commands and disable them. If a user is uncooperative, 
there's nothing Word can do to prevent printing.

Add these macros (http://www.gmayor.com/installing_macro.htm) to the 
document:

Sub FilePrint()
   MsgBox "Printing is disabled."
End Sub

Sub FilePrintDefault()
   MsgBox "Printing is disabled."
End Sub

The first one intercepts the Print command on the menu and its Ctrl+P 
shortcut, and the second one intercepts the Print button on the toolbar.

The drawback is that macros stored in a document always trigger the macro 
antivirus mechanism. If the user has set their macro security level to High 
or Very High, the macros will be disabled and there won't be any 
interception of print commands. You have to request users to set their 
security level to Medium and, when a message appears during opening of the 
document, to click the Enable button. The only way to avoid this is to 
digitally sign the macro project, using a security certificate. That's an 
expensive alternative to simply asking users not to print the documents.

-- 
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP        FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
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