Office Toolbar

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Is there any way to add multiple printers to the toolbar.
I have 2 different printers, and would like to print by
just clikcing one of the two icons, rather than constantly going to the File, Print drop down box.

I am running Office 97 SR1.

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There may be a better way, but … open the Printer folder (through Start, Settings, Control Panel). Create shortcuts to your printers on the Desktop, close Control Panel. From file Explorer, Cut the shortcuts from

WindowsDesktop

and Paste them to

Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOfficeShorcut BarOffice

(your locations may vary, rename them at your option.)

By rightclicking the printer icon in the toolbar you can Set as Default.

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I would create a macro by recording to change printers to printer B and print. then another macro to change back to printer A and print. Put each of these macros on your toolbar as Printer B and as Printer A.

Let me know if you need more information on how to do this

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David, I’d like to see more detail on setting up the macro. (And how are those cane toads?)

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I’ve actually been running similar macros for quite some time, so if David doesn’t mind, I’ll chime in here. This is how I did it, although other people may have alternative methods.

Decide which printer you’d like to set up the macro for first. Open your print dialog box, change the selected printer to a different one, and then click “Close”.

Go to Tools | Macro | Record New Macro. Name it something easy for you, like Printer1. Then click on the large button “Assign Macro to Toolbar”. A Customize dialog box will pop up, with the long title of your Printer1 macro under the title “Commands”. Grab it and drag it to where you’d like the macro button to sit on your toolbars. At this point you can rename the button or change it’s display image by right-clicking and playing around with the options there, but you can leave it as it is for now. Click “Close” in the Customize dialog box.

Your cursor will have a little tape recorder hanging around it – that means each step you perform in Word will be recorded in the macro until you stop it.

Click on File | Print or Ctrl + P to bring up your print dialog box. Change the active printer to the one you refer to as Printer1. Click Print.

If you don’t have the handy Macro toolbar open, just click on Tools | Macros | Stop Recording Macro in order to stop the recording.

Remember that all of the other settings, including number of copies, print quality (draft, normal or best), page range, etc. will all be set within your macro so if you at some point want to print a limited range of pages from a document on a particular printer, you’re going to want to skip the macro button and do it the manual way.

Repeat the steps for your second printer, and you’re done. I liked to add extra steps in my printing macros to save and close the active document because that was the normal course of my work process – if I printed the document I was done with it so why not get rid of it automatically. In order to do this, I would simply pressed Ctrl + S and Ctrl + F4 after printing the document but before stopping the macro recording.

This is a nice way to introduce yourself to macro programming – good luck!

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Are you running this macro from an application? My “solution” applies to the “MS Office Shortcut Bar” which resides on the desktop.

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You’re absolutely right. My solution is from within the Word application.

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Which begs the question, was the original poster, ajiwani, asking about the Shortcut Toolbar or an application? And shows that I meant to ask David if he had a Desktop macro solution.

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I guess when I read the initial question that was posted that he wanted to print a document with one click, I assumed it was from within an application. I would think a shortcut you could place on the Office Shortcut Bar would be to change the default printer, but how can you print a document from the Shortcut Bar without having a document within an application to print? I guess I’m really confused.

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You are right, you can’t print from the Shortcut Toolbar, but if it’s set always on top, it can act as an application extension. The minor advantage of using the Office Shortcut Toolbar is it’s application independence; you don’t have to create a macro for each app. One right click then one left click on the Shortcut Toolbar and the default is reset for all apps.

I live mostly in Excel, but occasionally do some Powerpoint work for presentation to the Powers That Sign My Paycheck, so it’s handy for me to make the switch while I have both programs open.

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Thanks Keely. You said what I would have said.

I would add that if you do not want to set all the printer settings to standard settings when you print using the button you just edit the macro and delete all the settings you want to leave as they are. For example if you do not want FileName:=”” you can delete it.

I tend to leave only the line:

ActivePrinter = “FILE2lgs01”

This just switches the printer.

Now the fun bit – how do we get the macro on the shortcut bar. I have not done a generic solution but one possibility if you were using it to print word documents only would be to create a shortcut to word which automatically ran the macro.

This would look something like “C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOfficeWINWORD.EXE /mPrinter1” (I have not tried this and do not have the time at the moment to do so) You may need to add “%1” to get it to load the selected document.

Someone may have a better solution using scripting. I have never used it.

Another solution you might consider is to add the printers to your “send to” list on your right click. To do this you open Start/Settings/Printers and right click and drag the item into Profiles/Yourname/Send To. (Different setups will have the “Send to” directory in other places, but it is there somewhere) When you release the right button you can select Shortcut.

Hey! You could put the shortcuts into the Office Toolbar directory and it will work the same way. I think.

There are many ways to kill a cat

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The Send To idea is neat: I just added it and it works a treat. Thanks!

I think if you look at my original response, you’ll see it does almost exactly what your last idea proposes.

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David, what happens when you remove settings from the macro script, for example the number of copies of the document to print? Are you then prompted by the print dialog box to choose the number of copies?

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The current values are used. For some settings (like the number of copies) there is a default (1). For others the last setting used is retained.

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You can put a button on the Office Shortcut Bar to print a document, however, that button will always print the same document and I don’t think that is what you had in mind.

There is a better solution for printing documents from the desktop from applications that support it. First, open your Printers folder and select a printer that you want to be able to use to do this. Right click on that printer and drag it to your desk top. Release the right button and click on “Create Shortcut” in the pop up menu. This should create a shortcut for the printer on your desktop. Do this for all printers that you want to be able to use to do this. Now, when you want to print a document, just drag its icon from your desktop or from Windows Explorer and drop it on the printer icon on the desktop. Windows will open and print the document. I think that all of the Microsoft applications support this.

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If you reread my initial reply post, you will see I didn’t put a document button on the Toolbar, I put a printer button using the technique you describe plus another step.

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