I’m trying to print a packet which is made up of several Word documents. The tricky part is that the different documents need to be printed on paper in the different trays. So document one comes from tray one, document two comes from tray two, etc. I can do this by hand by printing each document separately and specifying which tray to use. However, I need to print a lot of packets and doing it by hand will be very time consuming. I want to be able to select all 10 documents and their tray specifications, and then say print that 100 times.
This would be like trying to print a book where the different chapters used different color paper and each chapter was in a different file. Unfortunately, I can’t put all the documents into one file because of some formatting issues.
I have found a number of programs which let me batch print any number of files as a single print job, but they don’t have the ability to specify which tray is used for which document. So they would print all the documents from the same tray.
Does anyone know of a way to do that? Or a program which will do that? The important thing is to have tray selection support.
What I’m thinking of now is to turn off the print queue and print all 10 documents. Then somehow save the documents from the print queue (is that even possible?) and then somehow print them. Since I don’t know if that’s even possible, that might not work out.
You don’t say what model of printer you have, which is going to make all the difference in whether or not you can do this. Some of the expensive high-volume printers will have features like this, but most general purpose printers found in the typical office will not.
When I print by hand, it’s not a problem to specify which tray I want to use. It’s just a matter of opening the printer properties, specifying the tray, and printing the document. The problem I have is that I have 10 separate files to print and they need to come from separate trays. All 10 files together make one packet.
What I’m doing now is printing 100 copies of file 1, 100 copies of file 2, etc., and then collating them myself. It works, but it’s pretty time consuming.
You could do it using a Macro. It varies slightly depending on the version of Word you use (and I dont have Word on my home PC) so I cant give you specifics but basically you do the following
Go to the Tools Menu and start the macro recording.
Open up and print each of the files as you normally would
Stop the Macro recording
To print all your files on the correct paper you just need to run the macro.
I seem to recall that Page Setup stays with the document, not the application.
Meaning if you open up doc #1 and set it to tray #2 then save and close, then open up doc #2 and set it to tray #3 and save and close, the next time you open those documents those same settings will still be there (assuming you haven’t changed default printers or something that renders the tray settings incomprehensible to your PC).
So if you do all that, highlight all the documents in the folder, right-click and choose Print they should come out just as you’d like. You’ll have to specify the number of copies and click OK for each document in the little “Print” window but that’s about it.