How to stop Word from connecting to printer when document opens

[Helge Hansen]

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".

 

[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.