The effect of the settings for print spooling, background printing in Word,
and so on can vary significantly depending on general machine performance,
disk space available, and so on. Generally speaking I would expect switching
on spooling to improve performance, but in some circumstances it may not.
Generally the only approach is to experiment and see, and of course when it
comes to real printing, that can involve quite a lot of wasted paper and
other consumables.

There's a bit of info. about this in

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/870622

Peter Jamieson


wrote in message
oups.com...
Ah, I have a couple options I was looking at (I'm not very good with
printers, so pardon my stupidity). On my printer settings, the option
that says "Enable print spooling" is unchecked. I'm thinking I should
check that.

Next, on the advanced tab it gives me options to "Spool documents so
pages print faster." It has two options underneath that:

1) Start printing after last page is spooled.
2) Start printing immediately.

I'm not sure which one would help out more with this setup, I'm
guessing immediately.

Thanks again for all of the help!

Doug Robbins - Word MVP wrote:
That sounds like something to do with the print spooler.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

wrote in message
oups.com...
Yeah, it's strange. It sends 3 print jobs at a time to the printer.
I'll go watch the status of the jobs on the printer and at most there
will be 3 in the queue, once those are gone, more are sent.

Thanks for all the help, I'm going to try some of the things listed and
will get back.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP wrote:
Hi Peter,

The macro that I usually provide for this is:

Dim i As Long
With ActiveDocument
For i = 1 To .Sections.Count
.PrintOut Background:=True, Range:=wdPrintFromTo, From:="s" &
i,
To:="s" & i
Next i
End With

When this is run against the document produced by executing the merge
to
a
new document, it should not tie up the computer.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

"Peter Jamieson" wrote in message
...
I don't know which particular macro you used - perhaps the one in the
following article which someone else used successfully a couple of
years
ago - if not, perhaps it would be worth giving this one a try - but
a. I agree with Doug
b. there are a couple of other ideas in here, but personally I'd
stick
with the thing that /does/ work rather than pursuing things which
probably
won't

This question pops up from time to time and unfortunately
a. I don't have access to this type of printer so can't test
b. no-one has ever told me whether any of the approaches I've
suggested
actually work.

The main suggestions a
a. have a good look at the printer driver options, and see if there
is
any
way you can trigger the stapling action by, e.g. specifying that
page
or
perhaps the last page comes from a different bin. I doubt it, but
worth
looking.
b. if you have a detailed technical manual for the printer that
tells
you
what sequence to send to trigger the stapling action, you may be
able
to
put
that sequence into a { PRINT } field at the beginning or end of your
document. Again, PRINT only works in certain circumstances so it's a
long
shot. You might also be able to work out what control sequence or
postscript
code is used to trigger stapling by checking the "print to file"
option
in
File|Print and comparing the output of "stapled" and "non-stapled"
documents
in e.g. Notepad. Also a long shot. You may find with Word XP you can
issue
the corrct sequence in some way using Word Mailmerge events.
c. Instead of doing one merge for all the records in your data
source,
use
VBA to do one merge for each record in your data source. You should
then
see
one print job per packet rather than a 1500 page print job. Some
starting
point code is as follows - you may find see the Print dialog for
each
merge,
depending on the version of Word. If your merge processes multiple
source
data records per packet you will obviously need to modify the source
code.

If /any/ of these approaches works it would be useful if you could
tell
us
what worked, and in the case of (a) or (b), which version of Windows
and
Word you are using and what the printer is.

Sub OneMergePerSourceRec()
'

' NB, needs bettor error management and doubtless other things a VBA
expert
' will point out.

Dim intSourceRecord
Dim objMerge As Word.MailMerge
Dim strOutputDocumentName As String
Dim TerminateMerge As Boolean

' Need to set up this object as the ActiveDocument changes when the
' merge is performed. Besides, it's clearer.

Set objMerge = ActiveDocument.MailMerge
With objMerge

' If no data source has been defined, do it here using
OpenDataSource.
' But if it is already defined in the document, you should not need
to
define it here.

' .OpenDataSource _
' Name:="whatever"

intSourceRecord = 1
TerminateMerge = False

Do Until TerminateMerge
.DataSource.ActiveRecord = intSourceRecord

' if we have gone past the end (and possibly, if there are no
records)
' then the Activerecord will not be what we have just tried to
set
it
to

If .DataSource.ActiveRecord intSourceRecord Then
TerminateMerge = True
' the record exists
Else

.DataSource.FirstRecord = intSourceRecord
.DataSource.LastRecord = intSourceRecord
.Destination = wdSendToPrinter
.Execute
intSourceRecord = intSourceRecord + 1
End If
Loop
End With
End Sub

--
Peter Jamieson

wrote in message
ups.com...
This topic has been addressed many times I'm sure, but I'm
wondering
if
there is a better solution. Right now, I have a mailmerge document
that pulls data from a spreadsheet. I want these pages to be
stapled
together so I don't have to do the stapling. I found a macro that
sends each section to the printer as it's own print job, but this
is
not working like I would like. It's making my computer useless
during
the print and takes a very long to print.

Anyone have any way to staple sections together in a mailmerge
document? I'm guess there's problem no other way to do this
without
sending as seperate jobs, but I would LOVE for there to be some way
of
doing this.

Thanks in advance for the help!

Stephen Mizell