Change Word Document into Greyscale?

[PhotoOpp]

My daughter is away at college and has a HP psc 1210 printer. This printer has been severely crippled by HP in terms of the driver. There is no way to control printing in B&W or Greyscale unless the document is in fact B&W or has been converted to greyscale prior to being sent to the printer! The only way to print a colour document in B&W is to physically remove the colour cartridge!!

So my question... is there a way to convert a document to greyscale within Word so that it can be sent as such to the printer? She would like to be able to do this so that she can print pictures downloaded from the net without having to open a paint program and do the conversion.

 

[mscallisto]

If it's a question of bad driver, can't you get the correct driver?

 

[PhotoOpp]

I didn't say it was a bad driver... unfortunately it is the correct driver for the printer. It is just that HP appear to have deliberately crippled the driver so that there is a very limited control over printing features. In fact, on their site they explain that you should take out the colour cartridge to get B&W printing! However, they also state that removing the cartridge will slow down the speed of the printing!! Go figure...

In another tek-tips forum I asked the question whether anyone has experience using a different driver (perhaps for another HP printer), for this printer, that would allow more control over the features. So far, no replies...

 

[fumei]

I do not think Word itself can tell a printer to only print in greyscale. It simply pools the document, including any bitmap objects. If those bitmaps are RGB color, then that is what is spooled.

You can explicitly alter color of drawing objects, by VBA, but a bitmap image is held by Word as a array of bytes. It can not alter that natively.

Gerry

 

[mscallisto]

Sorry I missread the thread, you can however download another HP driver that shares a close model number and give it a try. If it doesn't work you can re-install the proper driver. Worth a try.

 

[asrisk]

You imply that you are only interested in *pictures* being B&W, not text.

If this is the case, then right-click the picture, choose "Format Picture", select the "Picture" tab, and in the "Color" dropdown choose either "Grayscale" or "Black and White".

If there are lots of pictures, you can use Ctrl-Y to quickly repeat the process on subsequent pictures.



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[fumei]

If you just want to set all the pictures to greyscale, you can put the following into a code module.

Dim mShape As InlineShape
For Each mShape In ActiveDocument.InlineShapes()

    mShape.PictureFormat.ColorType = msoPictureGrayscale
Next
End Sub

This will convert every picture into greyscale.

Gerry

 

[PhotoOpp]

asrisk & fumei,

Thanks for both of those suggestions. I will pass these on to my daughter.