Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Vista - Printing Without a Printer
Need to print some documents for later but not near your printer? Iain Laskey has a neat Vista trick.
Do you ever find yourself away from your printer but needing to prepare some documents for printing? Rather than make notes of all the files to print when you're "back at base", Vista has a nice trick up its sleeve that can be very handy.
If you open the Printers window and right click on your printer's icon, you'll see a list of options. Select 'Pause Printing'. Now, whenever you print a document, it will be spooled to the print queue without generating any errors or warning. You can happily print document after document and Windows Vista will prepare them all and queue them up.
Once you later have a printer available and ready for printing, select 'Resume Printing' and your PC will start to process the print queue and print out all your documents one after the other.
This can be really handy if you do a lot of work on the move, perhaps on the train or on a flight. Best of all, most of the hard work of printing, the actual generation of spool file on your hard drive is already done so printing happens as soon as you select "Resume Printer" so even the biggest and most complex reports will print immediately - the only bottleneck being your printer's own speed.
Print to File
Another handy trick, especially in an office environment is if you have created a document that a colleague will want to print but they don't have the program you used to create it. What can they do? Well, if they use the same printer as you, when you print the document, when the Print dialog appears, select the 'Print to File' option. You'll be asked to provide a name for the file which will then be saved with a .prn file extension such as "visio-diagram.prn". You can then give this file to your colleague. When they wish to print it, they can either drag and drop the file on to their printer icon in the Printer Window or alternatively, they can open a Command Prompt (Start->All Programs->Accessories->Command Prompt) and type "copy visio-diagram.prn lpt1: /b" to print it out. The /b is important as that tells the copy command that the file contains binary data i.e. it contains formatting codes and other information as well as the text of the document.
