Using a Formula in a Footer

by Allen Wyatt (last updated March 17, 2016)

Skye has three cells on a worksheet that are important. One cell contains a start date, the
second contains an ending date, and the third contains a total for the transactions between
those dates. He would like to have a footer for the printed page that incorporates these three
pieces of data, dynamically. He wonders if there is a way to get a formula into the footer so it
can reflect these values.
There is no built-in way to do this in Excel because formulas cannot be entered into footers;
they aren't recognized as formulas by the program. You can, however, use a macro to set
your footer. Let's assume, for the sake of this approach, that your start date is contained in
cell E1, your ending date is in cell E2, and your total of transactions are in cell E3. In that
case, you could use a macro like this:

Private Sub Workbook_BeforePrint(Cancel As Boolean)

Dim sTemp As String

With Worksheets("Sheet1")
' Set wording for date range
sTemp = .Range("E1").Text & " through " & .Range("E2").Text
sTemp = sTemp & " (" & .Range("E3").Text & ")"
.PageSetup.CenterFooter = sTemp
End With
End Sub
There are a few things to note in this macro. First of all, the macro only sets the footer
information in the worksheet named Sheet1, though you can change this worksheet name to
whatever you need. Second, notice that the .Text property is used instead of the .Value
property. There are actually three ways you could reference the cell contents, as shown here:

sTemp = Worksheets("Sheet1").Range("E1")
sTemp = Worksheets("Sheet1").Range("E1").Value
sTemp = Worksheets("Sheet1").Range("E1").Text
The first two approaches are equivalent; they set sTemp equal to the contents of the cell. The
third approach is different; it sets sTemp equal to the formatted text of the cell. In other
words, sTemp will be equal to whatever is in cell E1, as it is formatted in the cell. Since you

are working with dates and sums, this is the approach you want to use, so it is what was
used in the macro.
Third, the macro ends up setting up the footer in the sTemp variable. As written, the macro
would create a footer that looked similar to this:

1 Mar 2016 through 15 Mar 2016 ($1,234.56)

Again, the actual appearance depends on the formatting in cells E1, E2, and E3. The macro
adds the word "through" and puts parentheses around the sum of transactions. You can
modify these additional elements directly within the macro.
Fourth, the macro assigns the formatted sTemp string (your footer) to the center position in
the page footer for the worksheet. If you prefer for the footer to be elsewhere, you can
simply change the .CenterFooter property to either .LeftFooter or .RightFooter.
Finally, you need to be aware that this macro is desgined to be added to the ThisWorkbook
module. It is run, automatically, just before the workbook is printed. It is not triggered,
however, by looking at the worksheet in Print Preview, so you can't count on what you may
see before you actually print.

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