Printing Options Gone Mad!
Printing in Visio. Phew!
I’ve been digging through the various options, and I am surprised to see how many different dialogs control aspects of printing in Visio.
Here is a quick overview of the chaos.
What’s great about printing in Visio is that there are many pathways to get where you are going. You can choose to scale a drawing by setting the actual drawing scale, like 1:10. Or you can scale the drawing at print time by choosing “print zoom to 25%.”
There is more than one path to print a small drawing on a large sheet of paper. And there is more than one way to print a large drawing on a small piece of paper. Likewise for tiling a large drawing across several small sheets of printer paper. Etcetera, etcetera.
The bad news is that at first glance, it looks horribly confusing. It also makes an exhaustive discussion of all printing features and possibilities extremely awkward, long-winded, and near-impossible.
So we’ll choose the short route.
What follows is a quick tour of Visio’s printing-related dialog boxes, along with a few words on how to find them, and (maybe) what they’re good for! Have a look around. Notice a few things. Say “Oh!” a few times. Don’t think too hard.
Getting Started With Printing
The first place to start is the Page Setup dialog. In Visio 2010, you can get there by right-clicking any page tab at the bottom of the drawing window:
Another nice way to get there is from the parallel world of Print Preview. In Visio 2010, the Print Preview uses the ribbon UI, which looks like this:
I’ll go out on a limb and say that I like this ribbon tab! It’s got what you need in one, easy to use place, and it beats digging around in the backstage area for print options.
The Page Setup Dialog
Once you’re in Page Setup, you’ll notice a whole slew of tabs. The first two are the most important for printing.
Print Setup Tab
Print Setup is mostly concerned with the paper that is inside of the printer:
click to view larger image
You can see that there are orientation options, as well as a couple of zoom settings. You can also choose to print gridlines, which is kind of nice!
Page Size Tab
The second tab, Page Size, is more concerned with the virtual paper that you see in your Visio drawing window.
By specifying the size and orientation of the “desired” paper, you tell Visio how to draw the paper on the screen.
click to view larger image
The Drawing Scale tab is also important but we’ll stay out of there for now. I’ll just note that you can specify scales for your Visio drawing, such as 1” = 1’-0” or 1:10 or 25:1. Drawing scales save you the trouble of doing the math, and allow you to draw real-world objects in real-world units. For instance, 1” = 1’-0” means that 1 inch on the screen represents 1 foot (12 inches) in the real world. Similarly, 1:10 means that 1 mm on-page is 10 mm in the real world. Or 1 furlong on-page is 10 furlongs in the real world.
A nice feature of the Page Setup dialog is the preview area on the right. It helps you better understand current settings by visualizing the drawing page and the printer paper. Here we can see that we’ve set our drawing page to have a portrait orientation, but the printer settings are at landscape. Clearly settings need to be tweaked before we print!
click to view larger image
Print Setup
If you look again at that first tab, Print Setup, you’ll notice that there’s a Setup… button in the top-left quadrant of the dialog.
That ellipsis tells you there’s more lurking behind this dialog. Click the button and you’ll see the Print Setup dialog:
Not only does this dialog have the same name as the tab from whence it came, but it has almost the same settings. There are a few extras, however, such as the margins and the centering options for Small drawings.
I’m not sure why this dialog exists, but it may be related to the printer driver for you printer, and may be slightly different for different printers. But don’t quote me on that. Perhaps it’s just a historical artifact.
Just Before Wasting Trees
And last, but not least the there’s the Print dialog:
Ok, not really last. If you click the Propertiess… button, you’ll get into a printer-specific dialog. This is basically an interface into the options that your printer manufacturer has decided you can hae access to.
For my HP Color Laserjet 1022, it looks like this.
My favorite tab here is the Finishing tab. That is where I can print four pages per page, and specify double-sided printing, to save even more trees!
I can see that they could condense the options, but I would not want Microsoft to remove any functionality.
The printer options dialog is also necessary in my opinion, but that is separate from.
I enjoy the control that the dialogs provide, because I know I will get the output that I ask for.
For a non-power user, that tends to get overwhelmed by dialog boxes with tabs, I would recommend a Mac and with OmniGraffle.
Yeah, I think that after you use it for a while, it starts to make sense, you see where functionality overlaps, and it doesn’t really bother you.
In fact the overlap actually helps: you can get into print configuration from different starting points, and don’t have to back out or go somewhere else to set what you need.
Hopefully for beginner- and intermediate users, this article will help by letting them quickly browse all the printing-related screens without having to read a whole book!
how do I print the tab name in footer or header? Do you have any suggestions? I am using Visio 2003.
Hi Abhishek,
I think you go to View > Header & Footer.
There you can insert codes for info such as:
- Page number
- Page name
- Current time
- Total number of printed pages
- Current date in short format
- Current date in long format
- Filename
- File extension
- Filename and extension
Just go to the header/footer left/center/right text box that you want to fill out, then hit the arrow key to select a field to add.
You wanted “tab name” which is the same as “page name”.
Thank you. That worked.
I would like to set the print range default for all visio printing to current page instead of all. Major forests have gone into the recycle bin because I forget to do this. Any help?
Hi Don,
You can change some options for your printer in general via Control Panel. There, for a printer, you can set its preferences, for example, to always print two pages per page, with duplex. (I do this to make up for the trees you’ve destroyed.)
But I couldn’t see a way to set the “print current page” for the printer in either Control Panel or in a Visio document’s settings (thinking you could at least make a template that prints current page by default…)
Looks like maybe developing a habit is the best way to go, or always print to PDF, then print to paper?
Great Site! Is there any way to set the Print Area like in Excel? I have a stencil that I use on different sized sheets that just displays the word “Draft” at 45 degree angles every 4 inches. The size of the stencil is 48″ x 60″ but I often use it on 8.5 x 13 or other sized sheets. I wish I could just crop out the ‘excess’…perhaps a custom fill pattern within a rectangle the size of the sheet would work? I want my Print Area!
Thanks!
Hi KJ,
For the “draft” thing, you might investigate creating a custom pattern that repeats automatically. See: Hexagonal Custom Fill Pattern for an example, as well as some how-to info.
Many print drivers also have an option to print a watermark, I know my HP LaserJet 2600n does.
Visio has a print current view setting, as you might have noticed in the article. You could just resize your “Draft” shape to fit in the current view. See: Resize Text With Metafiles! and Top Twelve Text Tips (tip #11) for more info on getting text to resize with shapes.
Hi, I am making a map, and somehow I got a copy of the map, somewhat overlapped on top of the other. How can I get rid of the duplicate without deleting it piece by piece?
Hi there,can you help me with visio printing. I am designing large Org structures using visio,my problem is that when i print, they come out too small. I have tried all the resizing and page setup but they still coming out too small even though my page is A3 to accommodate these large drawings. I will appreciate your assistance.
I can print fine to a standard hp laser printer. But I cannot print to my HP Design Jet 510 Plotter. Any suggestions?
Hi Jonathan,
That’s pretty vague. Nothing prints, something prints badly. HP Design Jet 510 Plotter not selected in the printer list?
One trick that usually works: just export your file as a (very large) bitmap, then send it to the printer. For instance:
1. File > Save
2. As, for example: “Print Job.bmp”
3. Enter a custom resolution, as high as the printer, like 300 x 300 or 600 x 600 dpi.
4. Note the huge file on your disk. Open it and send to the printer.
I struggled with printing large org charts for my company. I found your site to be very helpful and was able to correct my errors. The charts are printing perfectly now! Thanks
IS THERE ANY UPDATES ON THE FOLLOWING ITEM:
“I WOULD LIKE TO SET THE PRINT RANGE TO DEFAULT FOR ALL VISIO PRINTING TO CURRENT PAGE INSTEAD OF ALL”
Plenty of reading here for a newbie- went through the print article and didn’t see what I was wanting, which was how to save the current page, or page range, to pdf in V2010, without saving the whole project. Anybody know?
Hey BB,
When you do a Save As and choose PDF, an extra “Options…” button appears at the bottom of the Save As dialog. This pops up another dialog, which lets you specify a page range to output.
Cheers,
Chris
Good article Visio Guy. Question:
Say for example that I create a diagram in Visio 2010 on a 8.5 x 11 drawing space. When I print it, it takes up most of the 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. Then, I decide to print out an 11 x 17 version. So in the design tab I change the page size to 11 x 17. So now my drawing space has increased, GREAT. But my diagram is the same size. (small, and not taking advantage of the larger paper size)
At this point, how do I enlarge the diagram as a whole to take advantage of the larger paper size?
Hi Mike,
You don’t need to change the page size at all. You can let the printing options do the work for you.
Leaving your page size at 8.5 x 11, try this:
1. Go to Page Setup dialog. (There are lots of ways to get to the Page Setup dialog, like right-clicking the page tab at the bottom of the drawing window.)
2. Go to the Page Size tab and select Pre-defined size: Standard, letter: 8.5 in. x 11 in. The default setting “Let Visio expand the page as needed” will change the page size with the printer paper size, and will mess up what we are trying to do.
3. Go to the Print Setup tab.
4. Choose Tabloid (B): 11 in. x 17 in. for the Printer Paper setting. Your Visio page and printer paper sizes are now different sizes, which is just what we want.
5. Set Print Zoom to Fit to 1 sheet across by 1 sheet down.
Your document will now be stretched across a piece of printer paper paper that is larger than the Visio page. By enlarging a printout using print settings, you don’t have to alter the drawing at all and risk messing up details, or encountering shape behavior that doesn’t scale the way you want it to (like font sizes don’t grow automatically…)
Thanks for the help. I tried it and it works, but gee whiz that is NOT intuitive for an average joe user!
I also realized that I could copy the diagram, then paste as an enhanced metafile image into a larger sized document, and then scale as needed. (Seems like enhanced metafile is vector based so it scales up without degrading in quality.) For the users I’m trying to help this might make more sense.
Thanks for writing out those instructions, I definitely have a better understanding now.
Visio Guy,
I have Visio 2010 and print mostly to a large format printer (24″x36″ or 30″x42″). Is there a way to define a custom printer paper size or at least be able to pull the print sizes from an existing printer? Visio has a lot of choices but none of the larger format sizes.
The printer dialog box appears to pickup the correct size when I view its properties just before printing (like you talk about in the section above “Just Before Wasting Trees”. Thanks for your help.
Hey Visio Guy,
I have a laptop, a mac, and a pc with my printer directly connected to my mac (print server). I can print everything from my laptop, mac, and pc with the exception of Visio 2010 from my pc. Word, Excel, etc all print fine. What could be the problem? Are there application specific drivers I need?
How do you print the comments that have been added with the visio?
How do you print the comments that have been added?
I was wondering the same question as Jeff. I am having trouble figuring out how to print comments on my org chart. Any advice would greatly be appreciated.
To Don Gold and Oscar on the subject of setting Print Range to Current Page as a default. Like Visio Guy I cna’t find a place to do that but I added a Quick Print icon to the Quick Access toolbar at the very top and it prints only the current page. It bypasses the print options page and takes the default printer for the page. Works like a champ and is easier than digging for the “Print” button. HTH.
I’m about ready to uninstall 2010 and go back to 2007. I have a rather large drawing that I’m trying to get printed as on 17 x 11 paper (landscape). For the life of me I can’t figure out how to do it.
It leaves large 2 and 3″ white boarders around the print preview and won’t show all my document. Is there anyway to reset the defaults and make sure I haven’t screwed something else up somewhere?
Thanks!
Bill (and anyone else finding your drawing prints on multiple sheets of paper and has a white border visible when full screen)
Go to the Design tab and turn Autosize off (it toggles).
Right click on the background of your drawing and select Show Shapesheet.
Set PageWidth and PageHeight to your desired paper size i.e 297 x 420 for A3. Make sure you save the change.
Select all (Ctrl A) of your drawing and reposition it over the new background.
Repeat for any layers that you may have used.
Finally click Fit To Window in the Zoom tab.
Should then print and full screen properly with no borders or tile effects.
NB I have found that drawings such modified work OK Visio 2007 but Visio 2003 crashes.
(Does Microsoft EVER regression test their products?)
Hi Bill, did you check the margins in Page Setup > Page Setup Tab > Print Setup?
Are you set to fit to 1 sheet across by 1 sheet down, and is the printer paper set to 11 x 17?
Visio Guy, Very nice article and fantastic site. I am trying to print out a large network diagram than spans 6 pages. I have a plotter that will print 24 x 36. How do I set it up for Visio 2010 to combine the sheets and print out the whole diagram?
Your help is greatly appreciated!
the paper size is 257mm x 364mm, which is large enough for paper for printing to a HP 4020ps plotter. The drawing is not scaled to 100%. What am I doing wrong ?
Like others mentioned above, I am trying to print the comments I have inserted on a flowchart (using Visio 2007) and I have been having little to no success. I found something on a microsoft support website about creating a macro with some code they published but it does not work. Any ideas?
Hi Sarah (and Jeff),
Are you trying to print comments via Insert > Shape Screen Tip or comments via the Review/Markup features?