Page 785 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

printer before returning to work on your PC. (Just don’t put your machine to

sleep until it’s finished printing.)

Tip
During printing, the tiny icon of a printer appears in your system tray. Pointing to it without
clicking produces a pop-up tooltip that reveals the background printing activity.

Printing from the Desktop

You don’t necessarily have to print a document while it’s open in front of
you. You can, if you wish, print it directly from the desktop or from a File

Explorer window in a couple of ways:

Right-click the document icon, and then choose Print from the

shortcut menu. Windows opens the program that created it—Word
or Excel, for example. The document is then sent automatically to
the default printer.

If you’ve opened the printer’s own print queue (Figure 13-4),
then you can drag any document icon directly out of a File

Explorer window into the list of waiting printouts. Its name joins
the others on the list.

These methods bypass the Print dialog box and therefore give you no way
to specify which pages you want to print, or how many copies. You just get
one copy of the entire document.

Controlling Printouts

Between the moment you click OK in the Print dialog box and the arrival of

the first page in the printer’s tray, there’s a delay. Usually, it’s brief, but
when you’re printing a complex document with lots of graphics, it can be

considerable.