Jan's Working with Words

The Printing Process

Once you've clicked that Print button, your document is handled by:

• Word
  Formats the document for the printer.
  If you have background printing enabled, you can continue to work on other documents while Word does this. But don't edit the document you are printing!
• Operating system
  As Word formats the pages, your computer's operating system saves them in a section of memory called the print spooler. The operating system contacts the printer using the printer cable or through the local network.
  
  Once the computer and printer can communicate, the computer sends the data to the printer. The computer and Word consider the job done! But nothing is printed just yet.
  
• Network (for a network printer)
  Data flows from the computer through the network to the printer.
• Printer
  If the printer was in sleep mode, it can take several seconds to wake up, do its self-test, and be ready to receive data. Data transfer over a network is likely slower than through a cable the connects the printer to the computer.
  
  The printer will not begin to print your document until after it has finished any other print jobs that were in the print queue waiting their turn. Then it will start printing without waiting for all pages to be transmitted to the printer.

Printing large documents: Long documents may not fit into the printer's memory all at once. In that case, your computer will feed the data to the printer in spurts. You might notice your computer being slow to react while it is feeding pages to the printer.

Controlling Printing

You will find that you often need to stop a print job before it finishes. Perhaps you had the wrong color paper in the printer. Perhaps you saw an error in the document after you had started to print it. (That happens entirely too often!!)

Your choices of what to do depend on where in the printing process the document is. The faster you decide to cancel a job, the easier it is to do.

Stop from Word: Status Bar

Long documents take quite a while to prepare. Short documents are prepped faster than the icon can be drawn on the screen.

While preparing a document for the printer, Word shows an animated progress bar on the Status bar.

Cancel printing:  If the document is fairly long and you are fast enough, click the X button on the progress bar to stop the formatting process.

Once Word is finished with its part, the progress bar vanishes. This does not mean that the document has finished printing! It just means that Word has finished preparing the document for the printer.

You'll have to go elsewhere now to stop the print job.

Stop from Print Queue Window

When you tell a program to print a document, the printer icon  appears in the Notification area  beside the clock.

If you double-click this icon, a window opens that shows all the print jobs in the print queue (waiting to be done) for this printer. You can do some managing of the printing process from this window.

If the printer is on a network like the illustration, you may have to go to the computer that controls the printer to do some tasks. (Ask your instructor about the situation in your computer lab.)

Cancel a job: Select the job in the list and press the DELETE key. If you are using a network printer, you can cancel your own jobs from the computer that you are using but no other jobs. Pages that are already in the printer's memory will print even though you deleted the job!

Pause a job: Right click on the job and choose  Pause Printing  from the popup menu. Or choose  Document   >   Pause Printing  from the Printer window menu. You probably can not pause a print job on a network printer from your own computer once it starts. You must go to the computer that controls the printer once it actually starts to print.

Change order of jobs: Drag the job to a different spot in the list. You can't change the order for a job that has already started printing. You may not be able to change the order for a networked printer from your computer.

Errors: If your printer runs out of paper, has a paper jam, is not connected to the computer, runs out of ink or toner, or experiences some other kind of problem, you may see an error message. Pay careful attention to what it says. Some printers can diagnose many problems themselves and tell you what to do.

Stop from the Printer

Once Windows has finished sending the document to the printer, the only way to stop the job is from the actual printer. A short document is really hard to catch before it prints. A long document can be stopped at the printer... sometimes.   There will be a menu of some sort or a button to use to Cancel Job. At worst you can pull all the paper out of the printer or turn it off. However, those methods do not get rid of the job in the printer's memory. <sigh> Printers are quite different about how to clear an existing job. Keep those booklets that come with your printer forever, or at least until it dies or you get rid of it!

How Many Printers?

You may have more printers installed than you expect. When you replace a printer with a new one, the old printer remains installed and still shows in the list of printers until you uninstall that printer. If you unplug a printer from a USB port and then plug it into a different port, the printer will install again and will show up twice! One will have (Copy 1) after the name. Other "devices" in the list may not be physical printers at all. They create a file instead of printing on paper.

You can see all of the installed printers in the Control Panel's Devices and Printers. The look depends on your folder options. How you open that window depends on your versions of Windows.

• WinXP: Start menu > Printers and Faxes
• Vista, Win7: Start menu >  Devices and Printers
• Win8, 8.1: Start screen > type Control Panel > Devices and Printers
• Win10: Windows Search > Devices and Printers
• Win10: Start > Settings > Devices > Printers & Scanners

In Windows 10 you can also see your printers in a Settings window. A very different look!

Your printer's manufacturer may have provided an icon that looks just like the printer. Otherwise, the icons for printers seem to be in categories rather than being portraits.

A grayed out printer icon means that the printer is installed, but is turned off or is not connected.

= default printer.

= shared. Any computer on the network can print from this device.

Double-clicking on a printer's icon opens the print queue window, or a custom window for that printer. Such a custom window will have a link to the print queue window, like "See what's printing" or "Jobs in queue".