Forum Discussion
Printing in SharePoint
I'm looking for a bit of insight more than anything here.
I've read plenty of older posts on this topic and am just wondering if it's in the same position.
I'm aware that there is no Out of the Box solution to printing in SharePoint Online, but I'm just making sure I've got the workarounds right.
I'm making a guide of alternative methods and as far as I can tell there's two.
Just a prerequisite, Open in App isn't enabled for PDFs at the moment as our users haven't got OneDrive provisioned yet, and Syncing is turned off on our sites (Offline Client Availability).
This leaves me, as far as I can tell, with two methods.
1. Opening the Document and printing using the printing feature within.
(This is only possible for M365 applications as far as I can tell. Whenever I try to print PDFs via the SharePoint previewer it just downloads the PDF).
2. Download and print from File Explorer
Once downloaded to File Explorer, it is able to open in app, which allows you to print it.
The downside to this though is you have to download and delete all the PDFs you want to download.
As I don't do much printing in IT I didn't really notice this as an issue, but the more I think about it the more surprised I am that a function such as printing a document is so convoluted.
Hopefully I've overlooked some method because downloading and deleting each individual PDF from SharePoint in order to print it could add hours to some users weeks over the File Shares that we've migrated them from.
I'm trying to sell SharePoint as the ultimate document management solution but it's getting harder when these kind of things are overlooked.
Thanks in advance,
Chris
CCChris_Martin
Another option is to use apps that show PDF files in the browser using the browser's pdf viewing functionality (example). Simply click on a PDF file in the Explorer tree and then hit the print button.
Do check if the File Explorer approach works if OneDrive has not been provisioned.- I'll have a look at Explorer, but our organisation is very tight on allowing new applications (government).
As the moment when I try to open in Browser it downloads the file, when I try to open in app I get an error message (expected as Offline Client Availability is off at site level), and when I open in the SharePoint Previewer and print, it downloads the file as well.
Once downloaded, I can print multiple PDFs at once using File Explorer (but only if they're all PDFs). It's the same with M365 apps I think but I'll have to double check that.
The download and print workaround is working at the moment but I've a feeling future directorates/divisions won't take it as well.
I'm hoping to have answers ready to questions they don't have yet!
