DotMatrix printing from Excel

  • Thread starter Thread starter Johan Christensson
  • Start date Start date
J

Johan Christensson

Hi.

I have a customer that has a Excel form that the fill out, and they want to
print this onto a pre-printed form using a dot matrix printer.

I worked out a VBA that takes the values from the form and passes them into
a nother sheet, and by adjusting the hight and width of the cells I can
predict where the text is going to end up in the printer. How ever. The
problem with this method is that I can't predict how many characters a
certin field is made up of form time to time, and this makes the possition
shift.

So is it possibel to instruct Excel to place a certin value at an XY
position, and/or stop cells size of infuensing on other fileds.

/Johan Christensson
 
Hi Johan,

I can't remember the last time I used a dot matrix printer, but I've
solved similar problems by changing the Normal style of the workbook to use
a fixed-width font like Courier. To do this:

1) Select a cell that has not been formatted in any way.
2) Choose Format/Style from the Excel menu. The Style dialog should be
displayed with the Normal style in the Style Name dropdown.
3) Click the Modify button and choose the Font tab in the resulting Format
Cells dialog.
4) Select Courier from the Font list. Make sure it is *not* one of the
True-Type versions of Courier, which can be identified by the TT icon on the
left side.
5) Click OK twice to accept the change.

Now you will have to go back through the workbook and reformat all cells
that you formatted manually so that they use the Courier font. Although this
change will not make your worksheets look very pretty, it should allow you
to predict where things will end up on your dot matrix printer much more
accurately.

--
Rob Bovey, MCSE, MCSD, Excel MVP
Application Professionals
http://www.appspro.com/

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You can stop the bleed over into the adjacent cell by putting something in that
adjacent cell. If you want it to look empty, I'd use a formula:
=""

It looks empty, but reminds me that I put something there on purpose.

(you could use a space character, but those are too difficult to distiguish for
me.)

If you use a Courier New font (fixed width), you could even truncate the
contents when you populate that cell.

mycell.value = right(myothercell.value,32)

But this doesn't work so well if you you're using non-proportional fonts--it's
difficult to guess how many characters will fit.
 
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