How to Print a Document in Microsoft Word

Where do you want to go today? Maybe Redmond, Washington to instill some sense into all those budding millionaires?! Dare we dream that they'll collide with a large hadron sometime soon?

OTOH, at least Bill Gates is putting his ill-gotten gains to better use these days in charity work.

But seriously, Chad, what did you honestly expect from a corporation which insists you use the start button to stop the computer?

I often wonder who populates those groups which Microsoft claims it uses to test its software. I seriously doubt any of them are like me, and I'm forced to use multiple Microsoft products daily at work.

Hopefully the increasing utility, ubiquity, and popularity of the web will render Microsoft largely irrelevant in the not-too-distant future.

It just works.

NOT!!!!!

I'm not sure what's up with your Office install there Chad, but I'm running Office 2007 Pro Plus on XP and Vista Ultimate and things print just fine. I haven't seen even one user here have this problem, and I'd have gotten an earful if they had (I'm not a big Office user, but a lot of the folks here live in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, and they already get pissy over Office 2k7's interface changes).

Gee, I'd better upgrade my copy of Word so that I can get that wonderful feature!

Or perhaps not.

I use Word at school because I must (and I'm not a fan), but when it's just up to me, I use WordPerfect. Yes, it lives.

I use Word rarely - where I teach we must use it for our syllabi (they are generic to make things constant across several campuses) and some other things. Everything else - tests, exams, handouts, presentations, is done in Latex. I can use my school machine, a home Macbook Pro, or an old desktop running Linux, to work on the same files.
When we were forced to get the latest/greatest Office on our office computers, the IT kid (he really is young, but very good) told me "You'll love it. You can make PDFs with it, and the equation editor is supposed to be awesome."
I've been making pdfs with latex for years, and the equation editor in the new word still (in my opinion) sucks. graphics are terrible - what is the draw? (oh yeh, uniformity, as I was told. We need to have a common platform so we can communicate)
Heavy sigh - and a wish for an evironment that allowed us to use the tools we need to be most productive, rather than the tools they need to keep track of us.

I'm with you Dean. In fact, I have my students in advanced lab use LaTeX for lab reports.

The other day I was using the latest versions of Windows and Word (I don't keep track of what they call them) and wanted to turn off the automatic capitalization and indent. I scoured the icons along the top but there was nothing obvious so I went to the Help button. Hang on! There is no Help facility! Apparently Microsoft think their latest system is so marvellously intuitive that there is no need for help.

Another irritation is the inconsistency from one program to another. I once made some diagrams of simple chemical structures in Paint to import into a PowerPoint slide, but I could not get the background colours to match. I started by selecting colours with the same names, then to giving each the same blue:red:green values but they were very obviously different. It took a lot of fiddling around to get them so the difference was not noticeable. It seems to me that the method for specifying the colour balance should be the same across all applications.

If you want the document to actually print, you must click the red X next to the status bar (if you mouse over it, it says "Cancel").

What sort of system are you running this on? No version of Word has ever worked this way (at least I've used every version in the last 15 years, and I can't imagine you're running one older than that): the cancel button does exactly what you'd expect, namely cancel the job.

My guess is that you've got a defective printer driver. Is there anything strange about it? For example, do you have an off-brand printer, or did you select the driver for a related model instead of the exact printer model you have?

I don't have a theory of how this works that completely explains the facts. Evidently your computer can send data to the printer fine, but there's probably a problem with receiving acknowledgements from the printer. This could cause application-dependent problems, depending on how and when (and even whether) each one checks for a reply from the printer. I don't actually know enough about printers to have a detailed theory, so this is just a guess.

This is Office 2007 running under Vista on a Lenovo ThinkPad, printing via the home network to a brand new HP LaserJet multi-function printer, with the latest drivers.

I'm sure there's probably some arcane driver conflict going on, but I'm not even sure how to begin to figure it out. It's at least consistent, unlike some other problems I've had.

Snarky title aside, this is more of an example of the bizarre shit that happens whenever I try to use Windows machines than the innate suckitude of Office. Office does suck, especially Office 2007, but this specific problem has more to do with my bad Windows karma than anything else.

You're blaming the wrong company. I guarantee you 100% this is the fault of HP's horrible, broken drivers. Hardware people write bad software, and HP is worse than most.

Tip: Never install HP's drivers. Use the Microsoft-provided drivers built into Windows. (This won't work with an MFD, I don't think, but Tip 2 is therefore "don't buy one of those.")

And as long as we're on the subject of Office 2007 inanities, is there any update on whether journals are accepting the DOCX format that was introduced with Word 2007? As of spring last year, I know several scientific publishers were not accepting that format because it was not compatible with their publishing software. Has that changed? I ask not because I write documents in Office 2007 (I also prefer LaTeX; I do have Office 2004 for Mac, but I keep Word around only to read documents that other people have written), but because I would like a heads-up for when I will be forced to upgrade.

@Dean [quoting his IT kid] "You'll love it. You can make PDFs with it": Meh. I can already create PDFs from any application, including Office 2004, by clicking the appropriate button in the Print dialog. Of course, this is on a Mac; YMMV on a Windows machine.

Leaving all the "Office sux" stuff aside for the moment, what I want to know is, who was about to run into a tree??? And how was this catastrophe averted?

Chris,

Who was about to run into a tree???

Emmy.

And how was this catastrophe averted?

I believe Chad grabbed her by the collar.

If prayer worked or telepathy existed Bill Gates would be undifferentiated quark soup, and Redmond with him. One can do more with a Linux right click than with a Wincrap desktop. One shortcut is to scream at Wincrap while recording a *.wav file. Then, doo-doo ex machina.

I'll bet that Word is doing something in opening the printer that is hanging; when you X out the hang is killed and it goes on to the actual printing.

The likely culprit is something on your home network. To diagnose, take your laptop off your home network and connect the printer directly to the laptop. If you can print without problems, then it's a "trying to do something over the network" problem. Another indication of a network problem would be if you can print without problems from an XP machine -- Vista machines don't always coexist peacefully with XP machines on "home networking." Otherwise a bad driver (as suggested above) might be the cause.