I solved a mystery this morning that has bugged me for a long time. As you can imagine I use lots of reports to run my business. I just noticed that half of them give me the “invalid printer” message when they are opened. This message usually appears when you move a report from one PC to another that has different printers. Because I fix other peoples reports on my PC, I see this message all the time, so I am used to ignoring it. But I only have one printer so it doesn’t make sense that I should see it on my own reports. The normal fix (selecting an existing printer) doesn’t work here because these reports are already pointed to an existing printer.

The message is also harmless. It doesn’t prevent the report from running. It just adds an extra click every time I open a report. That is why I ignored it to the point where it became invisible. But after one of my customers asked about the message I decided to see what it took to get rid of it.

So the next time the message came up I selected a different printer on my PC and hit ‘apply’. I then re-selected my main printer and hit ‘apply’ again. This fixed the problem on almost all reports.

On the few occasions where it didn’t fix the problem I clicked the printer ‘preferences’ button. This doesn’t appear for all printers but my Brother brand printer has a button called preferences. In there I found a setting that sets the printer preferences to the default. This also fixed the problem so I used that method on reports where the first method didn’t work.