How do I get Page scale to work on print function?

charels
charels Member
edited March 2022 in Reports (Windows)
I am using a very popular Brother laser printer. When I try to print, the page scale is grayed out. Quicken doesnt seem to be able to print reports on 1 page wide. It keeps printing to 4 pages for an income/expense report that normally prints on 1 page.
This is VERY VERY frustrating. All my other programs have no problem printing to a laser printer. This has been a problem with Quicken for at least 6 years. Can quicken please fix this or come up with an easy solution. Please dont tell me to print to a pdf file, that is just dumb.

Answers

  • Jim_Harman
    Jim_Harman SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    When you say "normally prints on one page", do you have another printer that works OK with the report, or if you do print to PDF, does the PDF printout look OK?

    If the Scale and layout setting in your Windows display setting is not set  100%, the Print Preview may not match what is actually printed. Could that be the issue here?
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  • charels
    charels Member
    The issue is not print preview. If I print to a pdf, yes, quicken allows you to shrink the page. In Adobe reader, I can also shrink the page to fit on 1 page. However, I should not have to print to a pdf first. Microsoft Word, Adobe, Excel, google docs, all allow me to adjust the size of the page to fit when I am printing. The issue is NOT the Brother print driver. The driver is up to date. The issue is Quicken graying out the ability to change the scale. I don't understand why Quicken grays out the scale.
  • Jim_Harman
    Jim_Harman SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    You are right, Quicken's printer page scaling is always grayed out unless you are printing to the PDF driver.

    But I am trying to understand why you need to use page scaling in the first place. Does the print preview look OK if you set the display scaling to 100%?

    Do you have a very wide report that you are trying to squeeze onto one page? The only way I know to do that without going through PDF would be to use small fonts and correspondingly narrow column widths. If your printer supports it, you can also get extra room by using legal or 11x17 size paper in landscape mode.

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  • charels
    charels Member
    Try printing a basic income and expense report. I use this report to prepare my taxes and have done so for years. You will notice that the income and expense report columns do not fit on 1 page even if you minimize margins to the smallest amount .5inches. For example, if you try to print this report at the summary level, quicken will print on about 4 pages instead of fitting the report to 1 page. 8x11 paper is standard size. Since quicken isn't able to fit its report columns on 1 page, I need to shrink the report to about 80% to fit. If you do a search on issues with Quicken, you will see many people complaining about the same thing.
  • Jim_Harman
    Jim_Harman SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    Sorry to be nit-picky but if I want to run the Income and Expense by Category report for taxes, I don't need a column for each month, just one for the whole year, so Interval = None and 2 columns total. No problem fitting that on 1 page.

    The Banking Transaction report subtotaled by Tax Schedule is a little more challenging, but I can eliminate a few columns and still have all the info an accountant would need. on 8 1/2 x 11 in Landscape.

    I don't understand your statement that the original report is 4 pages wide but reducing it to 80% makes it fit. Do you mean reducing by 80%? That would make the print tiny.

    All that being said, I agree that allowing print scaling with printers other than PDF would be a plus. This issue has been reported many times, for example here, from 2018.
    https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/19416153#Comment_19416153

    Someone should write an Idea post on this issue. Note as as discussed in the referenced discussion, this issue is not about print drivers, it is an application-level (Quicken) issue, because Quicken decides what to print on each page.


     
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  • charels
    charels Member
    If you select Reports>Spending>Itemized Category, the report shows8 columns across. If you try to print it, it can only print 5 of the columns and then prints the remaining 3 columns on the 2nd page. This should easily be a 1 page report, but Quicken does not let you scale down the print. But if you print to pdf and change the scale to 80% instead of 100%, it prints on 1 page. This is not functional for most people. Suppose I want to add additional columns and still fit the page to 1 page. With Quicken, I can not do this. This is a major flaw in Quicken that should be corrected.
  • yes same problem. not in previous years
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