How can I prevent Word/Excel from trying to reach the printer?

How can I prevent Word/Excel from trying to reach the printer?

Whenever I perform certain operations in Word or Excel (2007), these applications are trying to reach the printer. I work on a laptop at work and at home. When I'm at home (not connected to my work's printer), I sometimes have to wait many seconds for Word/Excel to become responsive after performing operations such as making a cell bold in Excel, or pasting a paragraph from a webpage to Word.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 340

Total answers/comments: 4

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bert [Entry]

"My default printer is the PDF printer installed via CutePDF, which is free :)

As long as I have a local printer defined, and it's default, everything's fine.

I've seen the exact behavior you describe when switching fonts, and I think it's because some printers have allowable fonts, and Word is checking to see if they'll actually render on the printer (though why this is necessary until you actually print is beyond me)."

bert [Entry]

One option would be something like this to automatically switch your printer based on IP address. It presumably could switch to none when you're at home.

bert [Entry]

"Whilst you can check the ActivePrinter property in Excel 2007, you can't set it for some reason (even though you can in a Word VBA script). Here's the workaround in Excel VBA:

Set oWord = CreateObject(Class:=""Word.Application"")

oWord.ActivePrinter = NewDefaultPrinter$

oWord.Quit False

Set oWord = Nothing

It is especially useful to change the default printer if it's currently set to a network printer, as delays are experienced if the VBA macro modifies a workbook (delete columns etc) - it seems to check on the printer with each change made. To prevent this the default printer needs to be set to a local printer during the workbook modification process, then back again afterwards."

bert [Entry]

"Another solution is to simply disable the display of page breaks on the slow tab(s). You can see an example of this here: http://blogs.mccombs.utexas.edu/the-most/2010/02/17/hidepagebreaks/

The print communication is often because Excel is trying to constantly repaginate your sheet, which is expensive and generally unnecessary. I have seen good performance improvements by simply disabling that option."