Solved: Word insists on printing to Manual tray, overriding printer defaults, how can I stop this happening?

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Ellis_F

Word insists on printing to Manual tray, overriding printer defaults, how can I stop this happening?

Hi guys.

We have just replace our MD's printer he previously had an HP 2550L and we have replaced it with a Brother HL-4040 CN. (Both Colour LaserJets)

The problem is that when he tries to print any of his existing Word documents it tries to send them to the manual feed tray although the printers options are all set to use Tray 1. The issue appears to lie with MS Word, as when you go to the page setup options and paper word is defaulting to use the manual feed tray. you can select tray 1 and it prints fine an remember the change.

All newly created documents all print to the correct tray. I suspect the problem lies in the fact that the HP printer only had a manual feed style tray available to it and wor has somehow remembered this.

Is there anyway that we can make the existing documents print to the correct tray without going into all of them individually and changing the settings in page setup?

I have checked the normal.dot template and this is se to print to the correct tray. Everthing I have tried seems to only apply to the current document.

Even if I try copying the document to a different computer and printing to the same printer (Brother) It tries to send it to the manual tray.

Any suggestions much apprecaited, could it be a Brother Driver issue Perhaps?

Cheers

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Ellis_F

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I have tried copying one of the affected files to my computer, when I set the brother as the default printer a check th page options it deafaults to manual feed.

However If I select a different default printer and go in to page options then it defaults to the correct tray.

Weird

Wadski🇬🇧

Make sure in Word that the page setup is A4 not letter. The HP had an override for letter and A4.

dopyiii🇺🇸

Word is supposed to select the default tray from the default printer driver preference setting (Start > Printers and Faxes > right-click printer > Printing Preferences). From there, it depends on your printer driver, but there will be something like a Paper tab/area where you can select which tray to use by default (don't let it select automatically - actually tell it which tray is the default).

One other thing that could override this setting (as Wadski mentioned) is paper selection. Except, check for what it is in the Printing Preferences of your printer driver. If it's set to something besides what's programmed for the tray, then the paper selection may (or may not) override the tray selection (confusing, I know). For example, say, tray 4 is letter and tray 3 is legal. You want to print on legal and your tray is set to 3, but in your printing preferences it's set to letter. It's _possible_ that you'll still get a letter printout. So, moral of the story is to check all locations :\

At our office, our HP printer would default to manual tray if there was a conflict between selected tray and paper size. So, we either had to manually feed, or hit the Go button to make it choose the default tray (letter, tray 4).

If all else fails, try deleting and reinstalling the printer driver.

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Microsoft Word is a commercial document editing program that is part of the Microsoft Office suite. It features numerous text-editing tools for creating richly formatted documents, along with tools for the use of macros in Word documents. Word's native file formats are denoted either by a .doc or .docx file extension. Plugins permitting the Windows versions of Word to read and write formats it does not natively support, such as the OpenDocument format (ODF) are available. Word can import and display images in common bitmap formats such as JPG and GIF. It can also be used to create and display simple line-art.