Remembering printer settings

[TomR]

Office 2003, Word and Access, mail merge.

I created the Word docs on my machine. Then when I copied them over to a
network share they lost the printer settings - I had set them up for a
non-default printer, duplex with stapling (Sharp copier/printer). They
always fall back to the default printer on the user's computer.

I set the default printer on the user's computer to match the Sharp and
redid the settings on all the documents (Sharp, duplex and stapling). But
once I close Word the documents again lose their settings - this time they
remember the new default printer, but they still forget duplex and stapling.

I installed SP1 for Office. They still forget duplex and stapling.

Obviously this is an Office bug. Does anybody know a work-around? Is there
a fix out there?

Tom

 

[Peter Jamieson]

As far as I know, Word does not retain information about the specific
printer set up for the document, at most using layout metrics obtained from
the printer. This is not Merge-specific, and since I am unfamiliar with
this area you may find it more useful to ask your question in a more general
Word VBA group.

Even the things you set up in File|Page Setup such as paper source are only
stored as numbers, not even the names (such as "Cassette") used by the
printer you selected, so they may be interpreted in weird ways by whatever
the current printer is when you reopen the document. (To find out what gets
saved, save the document as .htm or .rtf and open it as plain text - it's
probably easier to find the relvant settings in the .htm version, e.g. paper
source is defined using an mso-paper-source tag.

Word doesn't save anything you set up via the Properties button in File
Print - in your case, I would guess that would be the duplex printing and
the stapling.

So unfortunately, I think the only way you can get this right is to use code
to set up the stuff you need - possibly including the name of the printer.
You would probably need to use an Autoopen macro or equivalent event. What's
more, you can't just use VBA and Word objects - you have to mess around with
calls to the Windows printer APIs. The following link may give you a
starting point, but I hope there are other articles that are nearer the
mark.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=230743