How to stop Word from connecting to printer when document opens

[Guest]

We are a company spread across the world. Sites connected through VPN tunnels
over internet. When I send a Word document to a colleague in say China it
takes upto 10 minutes to open. Disconnect from network, and it opens
instantanously. The reason is, I beleive, that the opening Word tries to
establish communication to the default printer of the Word that wrote the
document originally. Which it actually can due to VPN.

How do you prevent this? Can you remove printer references from the document?

 

[garfield-n-odie [MVP]]

My guess is that Word is looking for the template upon which the
document is based. See http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=830561
"Documents that have attached templates take a long time to open
in Word 2002 and in Word 2003".

 

[Shauna Kelly]

Hi Helge


As I understand it, Word does not store information about which printer was
used when the document was created, saved or printed. When Word opens a
document, it uses information about the currently-selected printer.

So it might not be the printer that is causing your problem. It may be the
template from which the document was created.

When Word opens a document, it looks in the document to see what template
the document was created from, and then it hunts around trying to find that
template. That's because it wants to make available to the document the
macros, keyboard shortcuts, toolbars and macros that are in the template. If
the template was on a server, but you're using a stand-alone machine (ie a
machine not connected to the network), Word only hunts around the local
machine, so it does not take long. When the machine is connected to the
network, Word spends quite some time trying to find the template.

If that might be the source of your problem, then this might help:
Documents that have attached templates take a long time to open in Word 2002
and in Word 2003
http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;830561&spid=2530&sid=36

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word

 

[Tony Jollans]

Further to g-n-o's response which, I'm sure, is correct, you should know
that Word, unlike Publisher, say, does not keep printer details of any sort
with the document - this, of course, can lead to problems of other kinds as
documents can be (automatically) reformatted to fit the (local) default
printer.