Page breaks

You can set or clear page breaks using the page break property. The following sets a single page break to the left of column C and above row 10:

With ActiveWorkbook.Sheets("Sheet1")
	.Cells.PageBreaks - xlNone 'Clear all manual pagebreaks
	.Range("C10").PageBreak = xlPageBreakManual
End With

In AppleScript:

tell application "Microsoft Excel"
	tell sheet "Sheet1" of active workbook
		set pagebreak of every range to page break none
		set page break of range "C10" to page break manual
	end tell
end tell

Use page break of every range — not every cell.

In Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), you can also specify a horizontal page break or vertical page break by adding to the worksheet's HPageBreaks or VPageBreaks collection.

With ActiveWorkbook.Sheets("Sheet1")
	.HPageBreaks.Add Before:=.Range("C10")
End With

In AppleScript, it's actually a bit simpler since horizontal page break and vertical page break are separate classes.

tell sheet "Sheet3" of active workbook
	make new horizontal page break at end with properties ¬
		{location:range ("C10")}
end tell

You can also specify more properties.

tell application "Microsoft Excel"
	set page break of every range of active sheet to page break none
	make new horizontal page break at end of active sheet ¬
		with properties {location:range ("C10"), ¬
			extent:page break full, horizontal page break type:¬
			page break manual}
end tell

Set different headers and footers

At times, you want a header or footer only on the first page of a multi-page printout. Microsoft Excel does not have separate first page and even page headers and footers like Microsoft Word does. To print a footer on only the first page, you'll need to cycle through the sheets, printing the first one with the footer. After that, you need to remove the footer before printing the rest of the pages then restore it to the worksheet at the end.

Public Sub FirstPageFooterOnly_OneSheet()
	Dim sFooter As String
	With ActiveWorkbook.Sheets("My Sheet")
		sFooter = .PageSetup.LeftFooter 'Save footer
		.PrintOut From:=1, To:=1
		.PageSetup.LeftFooter = "" 'Remove from remaining pages
		.PrintOut From:=2
		.PageSetup.LeftFooter = sFooter 'Restore footer
	End With
End Sub

This is a straightforward conversion to AppleScript — you look up the analogous names in the dictionary and it works.

tell application "Microsoft Excel"
	tell sheet "My Sheet" of active workbook
		set sFooter to left footer of page setup object 
		--save footer
		print out from 1 to 1
		set left footer of page setup object to "" 
		-- remove footer 2nd page
		print out from 2
		set left footer of page setup object to sFooter 
		-- restore
	end tell
end tell

Note that if you have footers — left footer, center footer, and right footer — you'll need to save and restore all of them.

Print preview

You can use the print out method to create a print preview within Excel.

ActiveSheet.Printout Preview:=True

print out active sheet with preview

That does the job, but the script hangs as if it's tied up waiting for a response, perhaps from the printer driver. Here's the way to avoid that so the script can move on directly to the next line, or finish if it's done.

tell application "Microsoft Excel"
	activate
	ignoring application responses
		print out active sheet with preview
	end ignoring
end tell

If a later version of Microsoft Office introduces a Script menu in Excel, and you run the script from there, ignoring application responses will have no effect. It only works when it's directed at an application other than the one running the script. So run this script from the system's Script menu.