Excel Printing out Duplicates

 Well here’s a good one for you, and I hope that this helps someone if they run into the same issue. Two PC’s both have the same printer, and both have the exact same drivers. The printer was an HP LaserJet 1320. The issues was that Excel would print out duplicate copies of everything. Running Excel in safe mode, resulted in the same issue, duplicates. One would think that renaming book.xlt may fix the issue as it may be an underlying setting in the workbook, but that wasn’t the issue either as one did not exist on either PC.

The next step was to go after the printers. Now here is the kicker… the old printer was a USB Printer shared to other PC’s, thus the printer would show up as “HP LJ 1320 on pcname” but the port was a TCP/IP Port pointing to 192.168.1.25. What I ended up doing was wiping the printer out completely, and installing from scratch, using the existing port. After doing that excel printing was fine.

I guess the moral of this story is if you having printing issues with Excel, check to see if it is Excel causing the issues, running Excel in safe mode* will give you a temporary clean slate  to work with. If Printing issues persist, check the workbook file(book.xlt), just search for it under program files. Lastly for duplicate print-outs in Excel… wipe out and re-add the printer. More troubleshooting tips can be found here on the official Microsoft “How to troubleshoot startup problems in Excel” KB article 280504

NS

* click on start – run – then type “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\Excel.exe” /s (change this based on the location of your installation)