Excel Printing Issues

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Printing multiple copies of Excel Workbooks causes multiple print jobs

Printing multiple copies of Excel Workbooks causes multiple print jobs

When you print multiple copies of an Excel workbook, Microsoft Excel creates a separate print job for each copy, and then sends the jobs to the printer. So if you print 5 copies of an Excel workbook, 5 identical print jobs are created and sent to the printer. This behaviour is different to that of other Microsoft and Windows applications.

This has two implications for users of PaperCut:

PaperCut users using either the PaperCut NG or PaperCut ChargeBack popup client will be prompted to allocate each print job to an account. So printing 5 copies will result in the popup client requesting the user to allocate 5 individual jobs. Both PaperCut NG and PaperCut ChargeBack offer an option to Apply to all jobs in the queue. Selecting this option will assign the selection to all jobs avoiding the need to deal with a popup for each job.
If you have the “Deny duplicate print jobs submitted within” option enabled, PaperCut will release the first copy for printing, but will deny subsequent copies because the subsequent print jobs are identical to the first.

Workaround

One option is to upgrade to the latest version of Office. Microsoft has addressed this strange multiple-copies printing behavior in recent versions. For older versions, the Microsoft article below states that you can stop Excel submitting multiple jobs by deselecting the “Collate” checkbox when you print. However the downside of this approach are:

You need to manually collate the pages of the printed workbook
Users need to remember to deselect the option every time they print multiple copies of Excel documents.

Option 2

A customer in Dec 2013 reported that selecting “Fit sheet on one page” on a multi-sheet Excel document changed Excel’s behaviour such that it printed with one spool file rather than the 6 it normally used for that document. This might be a solution for some Excel documents.

More Information

You can read more information about this issue at Microsoft Knowledgebase Article Q211474.