Access card printing question

[emr]

Great, just as I was about to post an Access related question, I notice the thread below with you guys talking about helping out on Access!

This is the story.

I am implementing an Access 2000 database at the moment. The database allows an association to keep member info (names, addresses, fees paid, etc.) up to date and also to print membership cards.

Note that I am the one implementing the database not writing or coding it; all that is down to my boss so he would be able to describe in more technical detail the problem. If anything I say here is not clear just post and I will do my best to answer.


The network is running on a NT4 server with a mixed W98 / W2k workstation environment running O2k. Each workstation has a client that connects to the back end database which is hosted on a seperate NT4 Workstation that acts as the base server.

The membership cards are printed onto an Eltron P300 plastic card printer.

When printing to the card printer from W98 the cards come out formated correctly, i.e. landscape, correct margins, etc.

When printed from W2k the first card comes out correctly, then subsequent cards revert to what seems to be the default setting of A4 paper and margins, portrait, etc.

Now the client software is locked so the users only see what we want them to see and they can therefore not alter any of the settings.

What are we doing wrong here? Looking on the MS KB they don't talk of this issue (that I can find). All workstations have been fully updated with all patches, service packs, etc.

Any advice gratefully received.

TIA,

emr

[Lowland]

You probably aren't doing anything "wrong", you could review the following:

It is likely as you suggest that your problem is linked to the default printer settings in your W2K box(es)

If you have a true back-end database (that is, data on the server and forms, reports, queries able to be written by the User on a remote box) you may well find that Access is picking up the printer settings from when the original report was written. I'd have to know your exact configuration (is the database an *.mdb, *.mde, *mdp)

I would start by looking at the printer settings on the W2K boxes - I'll assume you know how to do this.

When you print cards, do you do this from an Access Report? I would always print cards by setting up an appropriate query (you could take the data direct from the underlying table, but that's a bit clumsy) and set up a Word Merge accessing the query, set the Page Setup (or label merge if you can print an A4 sheet of labels) to suit the label size. Of course, this way you can Print selections, and Preview what is happening at output.

My guess, however, is that the Printer settings on the W2K boxes are being overriden by the default (W9x) settings when the configuration was done.

Hope something in here helps.

Good luck!