Difficulty printing all of merged document

[VPatton]

I use a web-based application that allows me to perform mail merges for
certain letters. The letters are saved individually unfortunately rather
than being saved in one document. The letters are generated and then we go
to the "report" tab to find them within the application. I use Word 2003 and
have no problem highlighting all of the letters and chosing print - all
letters print. One of my associates uses Word 97 and is having difficulty
getting all of the letters to print at one time. We have saved the letters
from the web-app and tried to highlight them all within their My Docs, choose
right click and print; however, only one letter will print. At times there
are as many as 60 letters. We have looked at various printers to try and
eliminate any printer memory/buffer issues. No matter what printer is hooked
up (we use 4 different HP Laser printers), nothing will work. I am being
told this is a Word 97 problem and upgrading my associate to Word 2000 or
higher will solve the issue. True? False?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

You might get a more knowledgeable reply to thisin a more general group,
but...

I just tried selecting and printing a group of 10 documents in Windows
Explorer on a Win98 system with Word 97 and that worked OK, so I don't think
there is an inherent limitation in Word 97. However,
a. things may be different on a later version of Windows (you might hope
that they would be /better/ but that isn't always necessarily the case
b. printing from Windows Explorer in this way relies on Explorer
controlling Word using the old DDE communications mechanism, and some
entries in the Windows registry that tell Explore how to do that. (More or
less, anyway). The registry can certainly be corrupted in this area.
c. (the most likely problem IMO) I seem to remember that usiing some virus
checkers imposed a limitation on the number of documents you could select
and print in this way. Trouble is, I can't remember the details as I'm going
back a long way, but I think that at one time Norton AntiVirus limited you
to selecting/printing 4 documents at a time.

upgrading my associate to Word 2000 or
higher will solve the issue. True? False?

Can't be certain - your own experience obviously suggests that Word 2003 is
OK, but if there are other factors such as Windows version, versions of
other stuff, and (typically) different security environments, I would never
claim that such-and-such an upgrade would definitely do the trick.

Another approach you might be able to take on this one might be to write (or
have written, if that is possible in your situation) a macro (either in Word
or a Windows scripting language) to open each document in a folder in turn
and print it.

Peter Jamieson

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I just tried selecting and printing a group of 10 documents in Windows

Explorer on a Win98 system with Word 97 and that worked OK, so I don't
think there is an inherent limitation in Word 97. However,

i.e. nothing which restricts you to printing only 1, at any rate.

Peter Jamieson