How to Prepare Your Printer to Print Word 2013 Documents

Word 2010 For Dummies

Before you print a document from Word 2013, you will need to make sure that your printer is read for you. Follow these steps to ensure that the printer is ready to print:

Make sure that your printer is plugged in and properly connected to your computer.

Refer to the printer instructions for problems with this.
Ensure that your laser printer has plenty of toner or that your ink printer's cartridges are brimming with ink.

Whenever the printer is low on ink or toner, replace it at once!
Check the printer for paper.

The paper can feed from the back or top or enter from a paper tray, or it can be manually fed one sheet at a time. However your printer eats paper, be sure that it’s properly stocked before you print.
Turn on the printer.

You can try to print with the printer turned off, but it takes quite a long time.
Your printer must be online or selected before you can print.

This is weird: Some printers can be on but not ready to print. The power is on, but unless the printer is online or selected, it ignores the computer. To force these types of printers to listen to the computer, you must press the Online, Ready, or Select (or similar) button.

When you're certain that the printer is up to the task, proceed with the printing operation in Word.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.