Libreoffice Calc - Printing Cell Data In Black and White Only

[Canoe]

Version: 5.3.5.2 (x64)
Build ID: 50d9bf2b0a79cdb85a3814b592608037a682059d

I have multiple sheets that use colour coding for cells, both conditional formatting and basic style formatting that changes the background of cells based on their content.

Problem :
I’d like to print the contents of the sheet without any of the formatting, which is an on-screen visual aid only. So effectively all I want on paper is gridlines and the data within each cell. In MS Office this is a simple tick-box to enable printing in B&W only. I can’t see the equivalent option anywhere in Libreoffice’s multiple menus in multiple locations.

Can someone please confirm ; (without closing this as not relevant or outdated, as others have been) is this feature present in LibreOffice. If not, we can move on and either work around the lack of features or find another product that does support this basic option.

Many thanks!

[mikekaganski]

Not an answer; just FYI: “closing as outdated” happens after the question had been active for a long time. Usually no one would answer “there’s no such option”, because no one would feel competent enough to exclude possibility of another solution to a problem (e.g., using a macro; using third-party tools; etc.) - so the question either gets positive answers, or doesn’t get any (which is equivalent to negative) - let alone “me-too”.

I can say that I don’t know of such an option, it that helps.

[Kruno]

Could you save spreadsheet as PDF and try to set black-and-white when printing that PDF in your printer’s settings? It would be good that you make feature request at https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/.

[Canoe]

Thanks for the responses. I’ll file a feature request as suggested. I think it’s worth putting an answer on this one that there isn’t a way to do this, it may stop some people going in circles looking for a solution that isn’t there.

[Kruno]

Well, it’s hard to say ‘you can’t do it’ since Lupp posted a macro code which (at least to some extent) can do it. But yes, you can’t check a box in Print dialog box and get black and white output…

[Lupp]

Quoting @Canoe:
"… use colour coding for cells, … formatting that changes the background of cells …

Problem : I’d like to print the contents of the sheet without any of the formatting, … {[Italic by @Lupp }"

For “…without any formatting…” No solution I would know of, except:
Save a copy for printing and remove all formatting from it either manually or by a user Suib. (Manually and by user code very simple as long as exclusively direct or conditional formatting is concerned.)

For “…formatting that changes the background of cells…” only, and only if the colours are all very light:
Any printer capable of printing colours should offer an öption like ‘Print in Grayscale’ via its driver. The effect will not show in the print preview most likely.

The very simple user code mentioned above might look like the code below which is a slightly enhanced version of a “recorded macro”. It should do.

sub UnFormat()
dim document   as object
dim dispatcher as object
document   = ThisComponent.CurrentController.Frame
dispatcher = createUnoService("com.sun.star.frame.DispatchHelper")
dispatcher.executeDispatch(document, ".uno:SelectAll", "", 0, Array())
dispatcher.executeDispatch(document, ".uno:TableSelectAll", "", 0, Array())
dispatcher.executeDispatch(document, ".uno:ResetAttributes", "", 0, Array())
end sub