Lost Specific Printer Settings (1 Viewer)

This is more of a puzzled search for an explanation than a specific request for help.

About 10 days ago, one of my internally distributed databases lost the printer settings for every report saved in it. This meant approximately 15 reports designed for a set of specific label printers all decided to simply start printing to the default (A4) printer. Initially I thought it was something I had done, as only a couple of the labels were used, so I fixed them. Then another user who had been on holiday ran an update and reported the same issue with a bunch of other customised labels reports.

I hadn't touched most of these reports for months if not a few years, but without fail they all "reset".

Luckily I have a rigorous backup regime and hadn't changed any of the reports, so simply deleted all of them in my master copy and re-imported from a older working backup.

I can't see how this would occur so "silently"? The defective reports all had the same date/time modified (5th October) but I can't tie that down to any local updates or similar activity .

Has anyone any suggestions as to a possible cause? Just so I can try and avoid the problem again. It's a particularly pain in the butt as if you don't have the named label printer attached, you can't easily recreate the correct page setup.

Hmm, that seems suspect. But could it have been because of a Windows update or a Server update that happened on that day?

Are you using Windows 10? There's a setting that will change the default printer when you use a specific printer. (I'm not kidding....)

The good news is that you can turn it off.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...g/3c9a0daf-e101-40b4-b46f-16fffcbff982?auth=1

WELL, that's a new one! Just another reason I still work on my Windows 7 machine and use my Windows 10 one for *play*.

GinaWhipp said:

WELL, that's a new one! Just another reason I still work on my Windows 7 machine and use my Windows 10 one for *play*.

Click to expand...

I don't blame you. My main computer is Windows 7 but I have no choice but to know how to work with the headaches people experience in Windows 10 because they freak out when their reports change to the label printer and vice versa.

Thanks for the feedback.
I pretty sure that isn't the culprit, as this is a saved report option to print to a specific printer regardless of the default printer setting.

I know it normally "sticks" as when I open the correct versions on my dev machine I get the
message, this is the normal behaviour.

It's prompted us to revisit how we handle the label printing and probably make users select a printer on application start up and store them locally instead. In fact I might even use a side database to make it "set and forget" for the specific machine\user.

One problem leads to a shiny new solution \ more work

Hmm, you might have to do something like...

Thanks Gina, I'm investigating that at the moment.

I have always struggled with label printers and changing paper sizes without warning and then being a royal PITA to reset when you don't have access to the specific printer being used.

I'm going to have a mess about with setting a paper size in the report (as in set the page size to the same as the detail section) to see if it makes life easier.

Found it! I thought I saw something about paper sizes and found where I saw it. This might help...
http://www.utteraccess.com/forum/Select-Printers-Configur-t1982972.html

That looks very promising, and will save me a lot of time I suspect.
Thanks again Gina !

No problem, glad to help!