Printing an Extra Blank Envelope

Some of the folks in Jim's office use Word's Envelope feature to print one-time envelopes. Their default printer is a network printer configured to print duplex by default. Every time they print a single envelope, it prints two—the real one and a blank one. Jim is wondering how they can stop this behavior.

There are two things you can check to determine the cause of the problem. One is to check to see if your network printer automatically prints a separator page for each job it prints. Determining this should be easy; just print two separate documents to that printer and see if there is a separator page added by the printer itself between the jobs. If there is, then you'll want to talk to your network admin to see if this separator page can be eliminated when printing envelopes.

The more likely culprit is that the printer, even though you are printing a single page, still thinks it needs to print two pages in order to fulfill its directive to print duplex. You can figure this out by simply turning off duplex printing for your print job.

How you go about this depends on your printer. What you want to do is get to the printer properties, but you cannot get to them through the Envelopes feature. Instead, you need to close the Envelopes and Labels dialog box and then press Ctrl+P. From the resulting options you can choose Printer Properties to display the settings available on your printer.

Poke around in the printer properties (they vary from printer to printer) and find the control that handles duplex printing. Make sure it is set explicitly to single-sided printing. Close the dialog box and then press Esc to get out of the print options. You can now use the Envelope feature to print your desired one-time envelope. The settings you changed in the Printer Properties dialog box should remain in place for at least this single print job, and they will override the default duplex setting on the printer itself.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (12174) applies to Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010.