Printer mixing up print jobs

[Iman]

Hi all just wondering if anybody has come across this problem. If a user is printing a job, usually a big job and another user prints something the second job will not wait for the large job to Finnish. They will be inter mixed. The drivers are loaded to individual workstations to give better control to each user. I know it would be better to have them all printing through a print server but their I.T. people want it done this way. I have loaded drivers both through servers and directly to workstations but have not seen this problem before. Is it just a matter of trying to get the driver to spool the jobs before printing.

Thanks again.

[10871087]

Re: Printer mixing up print jobs

Hi all just wondering if anybody has come across this problem. If a user is printing a job, usually a big job and another user prints something the second job will not wait for the large job to Finnish. They will be inter mixed. The drivers are loaded to individual workstations to give better control to each user. I know it would be better to have them all printing through a print server but their I.T. people want it done this way. I have loaded drivers both through servers and directly to workstations but have not seen this problem before. Is it just a matter of trying to get the driver to spool the jobs before printing.

Documents will print in the order that they get to the printer and once a document starts printing it is the only thing the machine will process, jobs will not intermix (in my experience). You may run into the symptom you are describing if users are printing from Excel or an other app that use Excel or Access to create documents. Example: you can print a Workbook from excel that contains 10 Worksheets, each Worksheet is sent from the application to the printer as a seperate print job so in a busy office you where someone sends a 10 worksheet job from Excel at the same time as someone prints something else, there is a possibility that the jobs would intermix. This is a Microsoft thing and has nothing to do with the printer hardware or server setup, it's also the reason you can't staple a workbook. Most tax software packages use Access and Excel to take data from somewhere and build it into a bunch of tax forms, those will each print out as separate documents. To troubleshoot, find a document the got intermingled with and reprint it while watching the queue, what do you see, a bunch of docs or just one?

[TheOwl]

Re: Printer mixing up print jobs

This can happen if an application sends a page at a time to machine which esentually creates a print job per page. This would then allow another print job to come in the middle of the print job.

Things to look at to try and stop this:

1. Set applications so that they do not collate the job (as devices can do this on their own without the application trying to help)
2. In the printer properties and advanced tab, ensure that "Start Printing after last page is spooled" is selected.

If the problem still occurs, then you might need to try and narrow down as to which exact applications are causing the issue.