Excel - strange sorting & printing problem

[Paul Wagstaff]

Hi all

Office 03 / XP Pro / HP LaserJet 4100

I have a workbook that contains upto 100 rows of data. From a second
workbook, I loop through each row of the first workbook, and if it's not
filtered, take the value of each cell and print out a customer invoice.
There's a bit more to it, but that's the gist of it.

My problem is that the rows are not *always* printing in the same order as
they're displayed in the first workbook -- and this is a showstopper. My
client needs to filter based on a few criteria, but never change the
sorting. I haven't encountered this during my small scale tests, but my
client has noticed it when printing approx. 250 invoices I can only imagine
the printer is caching the data and then figuring out its own printing plan.
Can I solve this ? If so, how ?

My gratitude will be eternal,

Paul

 

[Dave Peterson]

If it's the printer, then I think you'd get better answers in an HP forum.

If you're not sure, can you test it using print preview (to avoid the printer
completely).

 

[Paul Wagstaff]

will do.

My thinking was that this is best controlled via the excel code (DoEvents
?), but I'm only an intermediate level programmer - and that's stretching
it.

thanks
Paul

 

[Dave Peterson]

Take this with a grain of salt...

If it's the printer, then I'm not sure you can do anything inside excel to get
that printer to behave nicely. If it's "rearranging" the print order
(arbitrarily???), then I'm not sure how you'd know what to try.

Maybe there's a setting in that printer that says "first in/first out"????

 

[Mark Lincoln]

I would think the printer prints pages in the order received. Are you
certain your code is queueing up the pages in the proper order? (I'm
guessing it is, but we have to look at everything.)

Perhaps the problem is occurring only after a certain number of
pages. The printer's buffer could be filling up and new print
requests are being handled before resuming previous requests. This
could be some kind of interaction between Windows, the printer and, if
your client is printing over a network, a network OS print queue. If
this is the case, you may have to break up the printing into batches.

Just some food for thought.

Mark Lincoln