How to check a printer's availability

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
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Guest

Hi all,

Two bad things happened during my worksheet printing:

the first time the notepad is not connected to network before I click the
print button, but after I connect the notepad, the worksheet could not be
printed out correctly.
the second time the printer is out of paper before I click the print button,
same thing happened as the first time.

So I would like to know how to check the availability of a printer before
printing?

Thank you very much.

Clara
 
clara said:
Hi all,

Two bad things happened during my worksheet printing:

the first time the notepad is not connected to network before I click the
print button, but after I connect the notepad, the worksheet could not be
printed out correctly.
the second time the printer is out of paper before I click the print button,
same thing happened as the first time.

So I would like to know how to check the availability of a printer before
printing?

Thank you very much.

Clara
Click to expand...

I'm not sure this is exactly what you need, but you can get some information
about printer status using WMI. You need administrator privileges to run it:


Sub WMITest()

'get active printer
strPrinterName = Application.ActivePrinter

'connect to WMI on local computer
strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" _
& strComputer & "\root\cimv2")

'enumerate printers
Set colInstalledPrinters = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
("Select * from Win32_Printer")

'Printer status:
'1 Other
'2 Unknown
'3 Idle
'4 Printing
'5 Warmup
'6 Stopped printing
'7 Offline

'get active printer status
For Each objPrinter In colInstalledPrinters

If InStr(strPrinterName, objPrinter.Name) Then
Debug.Print objPrinter.Name
If objPrinter.PrinterStatus = 1 _
Or objPrinter.PrinterStatus = 2 Then
Debug.Print "Printer not responding"
Else
Debug.Print "Printer status OK"
End If
End If

Next


End Sub


Hope this helps.
 
Hi Urkec,

It works well! Before I printign, now I can know the state of the printer.
Now, Could you tell me What is WMI and How can we take advantage of it?

Thank you again!

Clara
 
clara said:
Hi Urkec,

It works well! Before I printign, now I can know the state of the printer.
Now, Could you tell me What is WMI and How can we take advantage of it?
Click to expand...

WMI stands for Windows Management Instrumentation. It is used mostly for
system administration (getting system information, monitoring etc). It is a
set of classes (like Win32_Printer) that represent just about any computer
component you can think of. It can be very useful.

Hope this helps. I'm sure you can google a much better answer.
 
I think that this would be useful to me, but every time I run it, I get a
status return of 3, even when the printer is turned off.

Is there something I need in addition to this script?

Thanks for the help.
 
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