Recording the of number of pages printed (continual count-up)

[keith.gould]

I would like to know how i can record the number of times
a word document has been printed.
i.e. I have a master (doc01) and i press print i want the
document to tell me that the document has been printed
once. When i open the document a second time and print it
five times, i want a way that tells me the document has
now been printed six times.

Can anyone tell me how or if this is possible. I would
like to use this system on Word 97 and Word 2000.

All help will be gratefully recived.

Regards
Keith Gould

 

[Rob Schneider]

I would like to know how i can record the number of times
a word document has been printed.
i.e. I have a master (doc01) and i press print i want the
document to tell me that the document has been printed
once. When i open the document a second time and print it
five times, i want a way that tells me the document has
now been printed six times.

Can anyone tell me how or if this is possible. I would
like to use this system on Word 97 and Word 2000.

All help will be gratefully recived.

Regards
Keith Gould

I can't think of any ways except pure "kludge" ways to do this natively
in Word. With a some (lot?) of programming and system setup, maybe
possible but probably not bulletproof. Could be costly (but if your
budget and risks means this ok ... then go for it).

What I would suggest is that you "publish" the document (in DOC or PDF
format) to a web server, then use the web page logs to detect when the
page was accessed as sort of a measure of this.

Since people who can open the doc can print to their local printer if
they want, there is no point monitoring the lan printers, so I don't
suggest that.

 

[Mike Williams [MVP]]

I can't think of any ways except pure "kludge" ways to do this
natively in Word. With a some (lot?) of programming and system
setup, maybe possible but probably not bulletproof. Could be costly
(but if your budget and risks means this ok ... then go for it).

What I would suggest is that you "publish" the document (in DOC or PDF
format) to a web server, then use the web page logs to detect when the
page was accessed as sort of a measure of this.

Since people who can open the doc can print to their local printer if
they want, there is no point monitoring the lan printers, so I don't
suggest that.

I would agree. You could write some code to update an internal page count,
but then you'd have to make sure the file was saved after each print. Or if
you stored the page count externally, then if someone else opened the doc,
they might suppress running code. Or someone might save/copy the content to
another document and print that.

There may be some way to hook up custom rights-management (most likely
requiring Word 2003 and a rights-administration server) to accomplish this.

--

Mike Williams - Office MVP http://www.mvps.org/faq/

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