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Symptoms
There may be certain settings in Word that get on your nerves, like default settings that you find yourself changing over and over—the paragraph spacing, the font size—each time you start a new document.
When you print a Microsoft Word document, the printer settings are ignored. These printer settings include the paper size, the page orientation, and the page margins.
Consider the following scenario. You change the properties of the printer driver to specify paper size, page orientation, or page margins. However, when you print a Word document, its paper size, page orientation, or page margins differ from what you specified in the printer driver properties.
Cause
This issue occurs because the Page Setup settings that you specify in your Word document override the settings that you specify in the printer driver properties.
Workaround
To work around this issue, do not specify the paper size, page orientation, or page margins in the printer driver properties. Instead, specify these settings in your Word document. If there are multiple sections in your document, you must specify the settings for each section of the document.
To specify these settings, follow these steps:
- Start Word, and then open the document you want to change.
- In Microsoft Office Word 2003 and in earlier versions of Word, click the page or the section that you want to print, and then click Page Setup on the File menu.In Microsoft Office Word 2007 and Word 2010, click the page or the section that you want to print, and then click the Page Layout tab. In the Page Setup group, click Page Setup to open the Page Setup dialog box.
- Click the Paper tab.
- Under Paper size, click the paper size that you want.
- In the Paper source area, perform one of the following steps:
- If the printer can automatically select the correct paper tray to use, click Default tray in the First page list, and then click Default tray in the Other pages list. Default tray is the default setting in both of these lists.
- If the printer cannot automatically select the correct paper tray to use, you may have to select the paper tray that contains the paper size that you selected in step 4. To do this, click the appropriate paper tray in the First page list and in the Other pages list.
- If you want to change the document's page orientation or its page margins, click the Margins tab.
- Select the options that you want.
- Perform one of the following steps in the Apply to box:
- To use the paper size that you specified in step 4 for only the current section of the document, click Selected text.
- To use the paper size that you specified in step 4 for the current section of the document and for all remaining sections in the document, click This point forward.
- To use the paper size that you specified in step 4 for the whole document, click Whole document.
- Click OK.
- Repeat steps 2 to 9 for each section of your document for which you want to specify settings.
More Information
For more information about how to print documents from Word, view the following topics in Microsoft Word Help:
- Printing
- Margins and Page Setup
When you print a document, Word attempts to figure out the best printing method, based on the characteristics of your document. If you have a regular document to print, and you display the Print dialog box, the Print What drop-down list is set to Document. However, if you have the Track Changes feature turned on, then the behavior of the Print dialog box differs.
When you turn on Track Changes, Word automatically changes the viewing mode to Final Showing Markup. This mode is obvious if you have the Reviewing toolbar displayed, and if you display the full View menu you will see the Markup toggle is selected. When you later display the Print dialog box, provided you have made at least one tracked edit, you will see that Document Showing Markup is now selected in the Print What drop-down list. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1. The Print dialog box.
If you don't want to print your markup, it can get bothersome to continually remember to change the Print What setting to Document. There is no way to change the value of this setting to some other default; it is set on-the-fly, each time you display the Print dialog box.
You can, however, create a macro to do your printing. The macro could then be assigned to a toolbar button or a shortcut key, so it can be quickly executed. The following macro prints one copy of the current document, as if you had selected Document in the Print What drop-down:
The Item parameter is the one that specifies what should be printed. If you wanted to print the document with markup, then Item should be set to wdPrintDocumentWithMarkup, whereas wdPrintDocumentContent prints just the document, without markup.