Printing Format Errors on Reports

[u/Any_Meal_7539]

First ever post, but some people in the office have been having printing errors with Access as of late and I wanted to see if this was an in office issue or a problem with our version of the software.

When printing a report with multiple pages, the first page will format to fill a whole page as usual but the pages after will print really tiny and in the upper left corner of our printer paper. These are reports we run daily, and up until last week this hasn’t occured. The report previews look fine but still print incorrectly, and we haven’t made any changes to our reports so there shouldn’t be a sudden switch regardless.

Any advice would be much appreciated, I just wanted to see if this was a known bug and if we should revert back to an old update if it is.

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Below is a copy of the original post, in case the post gets deleted or removed.

User: Any_Meal_7539

Printing Format Errors on Reports

First ever post, but some people in the office have been having printing errors with Access as of late and I wanted to see if this was an in office issue or a problem with our version of the software.

When printing a report with multiple pages, the first page will format to fill a whole page as usual but the pages after will print really tiny and in the upper left corner of our printer paper. These are reports we run daily, and up until last week this hasn’t offured. The report previews look fine but still print incorrectly, and we haven’t made any changes to our reports so there shouldn’t be a sudden switch regardless.

Any advice would be much appreciated, I just wanted to see if this was a known bug and if we should revert back to an old update if it is.

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[u/Any_Meal_7539 → u/[deleted]]

Thank you, I’ll be sure to check this out tomorrow and see if this is the case! We do have a printer for envelopes and it’s quite possible that it’s what’s causing this sudden issue. The people reporting the problem are the ones who use that printer from time to time

[u/New-Control6412]

Check the print driver version on the workstations. Windows Update may have updated some workstations and not others.

[u/George_Hepworth → u/New-Control6412]

Agreed. It could be different printers, or it could be different printer drivers. We need to have printers and printer drivers identified in the reports, please.

We, at AccessForever.org, are trying to gather and collate enough reports to start a discussion with Microsoft. One part of the problem is that the reported symptoms vary and the problem is often hard to reproduce, as seen here where only 2 out of a team of users have it despite similar installations.

The better the details we can gather, the more likely it will be that we can present an actionable description to Microsoft.

[u/George_Hepworth]

What version and build of Access do you have installed?

In the Immediate Window:

?Syscmd(acSysCmdGetFullVersion)
Microsoft Access (Version 2607) Build 16.0.20228.20190 Current Channel 32-bit

Are all of your users on the same version and build?
Is this problem consistent across all users and all reports?

There a number of seemingly related problems with reports. Mentioned here ( as item d ), but similar reports have appeared elsewhere in the last few days. While there are some slight differences, the common thread is reports not rendering correctly.

It might be useful to rollback to a previous version of Access to see if that improves the situation.

[u/Any_Meal_7539 → u/George_Hepworth]

We are currently running (Version 2607 Build 16.0.20228.20190) 64-bit

This issue has only been reported to me by two users, though we all use the same version here in the office. I have not encountered it myself despite testing out printing documents

[u/George_Hepworth → u/Any_Meal_7539]

That suggests different printers may be involved for the users who have the problem.

You could also have those two users rollback to an earlier version to see if that resolves the problem for them.

[u/ConfusionHelpful4667]

Yes, there are a flurry of complaints.
Can you save the reports as a PDF?

[u/Any_Meal_7539 → u/ConfusionHelpful4667]

We can, that has been the temporary solution we’ve been using so far!

[u/ConfusionHelpful4667 → u/Any_Meal_7539]

What has happened is Windows 11 settings on an individual's computer is determining the default printer settings/ins and outs.
It is easier to save as a PDF and take the relentless updates out of the equation.

[u/Any_Meal_7539]

SOLUTION VERIFIED

After a day of investigating I managed to find a solution that worked for us! Turns out not everyone in the office updated at the same time, but those having the issue were in fact on version 2607 (Build 20228.20190).

The problem seems to stem from a recent Access update that causes things like lines to render strangely. The reason the reports were printing small had to do with how access was handling an unbound object frame with an OLE Class of Microsoft word 97-2003. Changing this object into a .bmp image has caused the report to print at normal size. I’m not quite sure how my object led to tiny printing but my guess is either corruption or as I stated some sort of rendering issue with this build.