To add to what Tony has said, here is my experience with canceling printing:
1. Although you can stop printing by double-clicking on the printer icon on
the status bar, if you have "Background printing" enabled, for most short
documents it will disappear too quickly for you to catch. Even with
background printing disabled, you're only stopping printing to the print
spool, which will already have sent a large quantity of data to the printer.
How many pages this will allow the printer to continue to print will depend
on how much memory it has; many laser printers will go on for quite a long
time, while some inkjets (which are line printers rather than page printers)
have essentially no memory at all and will stop in the middle of a page.
2. You can also cancel a document in the Printers folder, as Tony mentioned,
but, again, this just stops spooling the file to the printer; again, you
will usually have better results with inkjets than with lasers.
3. The absolutely quickest way to stop printing is to deprive the printer of
anything to print on, that is, remove the paper. Don't try this if you are
using a laser printer that is drawing paper from a drawer-type cartridge, as
you'll wind up with a horrendous paper jam, but if your printer has an open
paper tray or a gravity-feed open cartridge, just snatch all the paper out.
You'll still have to follow up with other actions, but this will solve the
immediate problem. This should always be your first reaction if you're
printing on expensive letterhead from an MP tray (pull-down tray on the
front of the printer).
4. Whether or not you can remove the paper, your printer may have a Cancel
Job button or some other way of aborting a job. If not, it will usually at
least have an On Line/Off Line button. Press this button. It may still take
a while for the printer to stop.
5. A Cancel Job button will do just that; taking the printer offline won't.
You'll still have to go into the Printers folder and cancel it. Even so, as
soon as you put the printer back online, it will continue to print the rest
of the job in memory. Even turning the printer entirely off and back on may
not suffice to wipe the memory, but the longer you leave it off, the better
your chances.
Of course, most of the above assumes that you have physical access to the
printer. If it's sitting on your desk, you can do this; if it's a network
printer down the hall, you'll just have to cancel the job from the Printers
folder and accept that there will be quite a few spoiled pages.
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
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