Printing Multiple Documents in a Sorted Order

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated May 27, 2022)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, and 2013

Fran's school has upgraded to Word 2010 and Windows 7 recently. The staff is trying to print multiple documents in alphabetical order. All of the documents print, but not in the sorted order. Fran wonders how they can print multiple documents in alphabetical order by file name.

Potential answers to this issue depend on whether you are printing from within Word or within Windows. If you are printing within Word, you may need to rely on a third-party add-on to manage the order in which documents are printed. You can find a free batch printer at Graham Mayor's site:

https://www.gmayor.com/Batch_Print.htm

If you are printing in Windows, then you may want to try this trick:
Open a folder that contains all the documents you want to print.
Using the tools in the folder window, sort the documents so they are in the order in which you want them printed.
Select all the documents to be printed.
Right click on the first document in the selection set. (It has to be the first document, not some other document in the set.) Windows displays a Context menu.
Choose Print from the Context menu.

At this point Windows starts to print all your documents. It supposedly works through the documents in the selection set starting the document on which you right-clicked. (Thus, the importance of step 5.) This should print your documents in the desired sorted order.

If that doesn't work for you, then you may want to consider a third-party utility program to do the printing. There are many available; these two may do the trick for you:

https://www.print-conductor.com/
https://usefulsoft.com/remote-queue-manager/

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13256) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, and 2013.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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What is two more than 7?

2021-12-05 21:08:48

Sunny

Thanks for above information. My methodology of print is different; ① I’m opening, print, then close file one at a time rather than opening & print multiple files simultaneously ② file types including Visio, Word, Excel, Adobe PDFs.
Why would printer queue different ? How to ensure printer queue to my selection queue?

Appreciate your help!

2018-09-03 19:05:43

Frank Rizzo

Sorry, to be clearer, this does not work for PDF files (Windows 10, selecting all and clicking the first one to print - the order is still scrambled)
and I was lead to this via this link (https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/education_ms/forum/edu_win10-edu_files/printing-multiple-pdf-files-in-order/6093eef0-f508-4cb7-9cd3-8e39a62c957e) where a shameless poster copied and pasted your answer, in a way that doesn't actually work or apply to the PDF question being asked.

2018-09-03 17:05:23

Frank Rizzo

THIS DOES NOT WORK. They come out in the wrong order as always.

2017-11-26 23:20:08

Chris

Thank-you! I spent the last hour trying to figure out how to print in desired order, and was 'Google'ing to many sites until I found your tip.

2017-06-05 05:28:57

Pawan Kumar

thanks Allen Wyatt Sir.....the trick worked for me.

2017-02-14 21:54:59

Yvonne

Thank you so much!
This solved my problem. :-)

2016-11-28 05:04:58

It worked

Hi It worked for us,
Clicking on the first image was a key.
Thank you

2015-10-28 10:07:06

Chad

Thanks for the tip on right-clicking the first document when printing from Windows. I wanted multiple images printing on a single page, and couldn't figure out why they were all in order except for the last document printing at the top. It looks like whatever you right click on becomes the first in the list, and all the other files are printed in order.

2015-06-15 09:53:16

lee

Another one is Batch & Print Pro which has much more options.

http://www.traction-software.co.uk/batchprint/

2014-11-10 16:26:19

Daniel

Hi Allen
thanks for that tip. Unfortunately since Word 2013 it seems not to work anymore to print from the Windows explorer in a sorted order. What I saw is that Word 2013 (different from older versions) doesn't open for every document a new Word instance but opens all marked documents at once. Then the order is reversed.
I have no idea how to solve this problem in 2013.

2014-09-27 10:30:18

Joe Gruset

I like to create a printer shortcut and drag it into the folder where the print files are and just drag and drop the files I want to print onto the shortcut and they automatically print in the dropped order.

2014-09-27 04:26:10

David

Word macro is another solution but Print Conductor is probably the best solution, plus it's free

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