Changing printer while excel-file is open

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dirk Flakowski
  • Start date Start date
D

Dirk Flakowski

Hello,

I have an Excel-file with about 2MB which contains a lot of
formattings and named cells. If I now change my Default Printer in the
Control Panel while this file is open then Excel needs a few seconds
to overtake this new setting. If I then take a look at my open file
then I suddenly can see the pagebreaks which were not there before.
After that my program tries to hide/unhide columns. But this action
now takes much more time than before changing the Default Printer -
before it needed about 0,1s and now about 4,0s.
I have a similar Excel-file where this does NOT happen. So it must
depend on that file. It also happens if I change the Default Printer
again to the old one - just if I once change it Excel becomes very
slow on (un)hiding columns.
It happens at least with Excel 2000 and Excel XP.
Does anybody have any idea what I could do against it?

Thank you very much in advance
Dirk
 
Excel uses the printer driver to determine where the page breaks should go.

Some printers can print more rows/columns than others.

This is a guess.

Try Tools|Options|View and uncheck PageBreaks before you change printers.

Maybe excel sees that you want to show them and figures that it should determine
them as soon as possible.

I know that leaving the pagebreaks showing can slow down macros that delete/add
rows or columns because excel is taking time to determine where the new
location(s) should be.

Another option is to try to make your print settings more generic. Be
conservative on your margins. Make it match the worst printer you have.

Then when excel sees the change, maybe your generic settings will not need to be
updated.
 
Hello Dave,

thanks for your fast answer which really helped me. I took a look at
the option "PageBreaks" and found the following curious thing: I have
opened my two example-files and took a look at the option: it was not
set in both cases. Now I changed the default-printer and again took a
look at that setting: not it was suddenly set in case of the file
which creates problems.
So the question is why does Excel suddenly set this option in case of
a special file?
But while taking a look at this I found a solution for my problem:
before again (un)hiding columns I just set on all worksheets the
property "DisplayPageBreaks" to FALSE. Then it works fine again.
But still the question "Why" arises... Do you have maybe any idea?

To your other idea: I just set the borders on very high values so that
each printer should be able to print it in the same way - but that
didn't help.

Thanks in advance
Dirk
 
I don't have a guess why, but I can tell you that it does the same thing with
xl2002 and win98.

I never noticed it until now, but the same thing happens when I changed printers
via file|Print in excel.

And I've never seen that pagebreaks setting checked right after I opened the
file. I had to either do a printpreview, a print or (now I know), change
printers.

I'm guessing it isn't a special file--just something that showed those dotted
lines.

=====
How about this for your next try.
Close your file (save it if necessary)
change the printer
reopen your file.

If it takes less than 4 minutes, you're ahead of the game. (not very pretty,
though).

And I don't know if it'll just delay the 4 minutes until you do a print or
printpreview.
 
Hello Dave,

thanks for your answer. If I reopen the file after changing the
printer then it always works fine. It just happens if I change the
default-printer while this special file is open.

Thanx
Dirk
 
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