# No printing from excel - prints from everything else fine.



## dr_insanity (Aug 19, 2005)

Here's a fun one for all you people out there in guru-land.

I have a user, their computer is on a corporate network using a windows domain and active directory.

They cannot print from excel to an HP LJ9050, they click to print and nothing happens. They can print from other programs fine. They can print to other printers fine. Other users with the same network privileges can print to the same printer from excel fine. I can print from her computer to the same printer fine.

Restarting the print spooler service solves the problem until the computer is next rebooted. (I have been getting a call a day to restart the spooler service)

The printer is using the PS driver rather than the PCL as this is normally more stable.
I have reinstalled the networked printer to ensure the driver being used is the same as everyone else.
I have purged her profile and re-instated a blank one - involving again re-installing the printer driver.
I have repaired her installation of office in the instance that this might have been causing the problem.

The problem only occurs when printing to the HP from Excel, any other program or printer is fine.

Any ideas?


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## dr_insanity (Aug 19, 2005)

I'll dredge this one up from the depths as the problem is still occuring. Since posting this I have now:

Re-installed Office on the users machine.
Re-set and rebuilt the user's roaming profile.
Wiped and replaced the user's machine with an identical model (Dell Optiplex 755) and fresh install of windoze XP SP3. 
The User is now printing to a different default printer, a Xerox Phaser 7300N

I did think that a problem might be in the user's normal template for Excel, but as excel doesn't have a direct equivalent of normal.dot as a default template, I have ruled this out. 

The only common element I can now see, is the user. Unfortunately our IT department hasn't been blessed with the ability to upgrade or replace these yet! 

Has anyone got any ideas what the problem might be?


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## cis4smack (Jan 19, 2009)

Have you tried removing the driver from Print Server properties. Re-installing it from the network and see if that changes anything?


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## dr_insanity (Aug 19, 2005)

Thanks for the suggestion. 
The driver would have been replaced on the local machine when that was replaced. The problem is also occurring when selecting different printers so I don't think the issue is related directly to the printer drivers in use.


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## cis4smack (Jan 19, 2009)

What version of office 2007 or 2003? Is it a certain file that can't print or if they created a new workbook and attempted to print it wouldn't work either?

Have you played with the printing preferences?


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## dr_insanity (Aug 19, 2005)

Thanks for your prompt replay; The user is running office 2003. 
Unfortunately the problem is intermittent, making it very difficult to lock down. Spreadsheets can come in from email, a network location or be created on the user's machine, and it is random which ones might print successfully or cause the spooler to lock up. after restarting the spooler the document will print fine, occasionally another document will cause the spooler to lock later in the day. 

More frustrating is that the network or email sourced spreadsheets have not caused a similar issue for any other users.


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## dr_insanity (Aug 19, 2005)

Update to this problem:

All add-ins have been switched off in MSExcel.
All Print drivers have been removed and only the relevant ones re-installed.

The problem is happening more frequently, now every time the user opens a fresh instance of excel the spooler has to be restarted.

On the positive side, I have generated a batch file to run when the user calls up so now it's a one click fix to restart the spooler. It's a shame the user does not have specific rights to restart themselves, so they wouldn't need to keep calling through when they need to print.


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## sreeram (Oct 23, 2010)

pls reinstall the updated printer driver it will solve the problem.


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