Problem with paper size when printing

We have a really strange problem here with the printers in our company. We have several users travelling often from Europe to the US and back. Their laptops are set up in the US. So all their configuration regarding the paper size is "letter". But when the users are in Europe they have only printers with A4. Since they are less then 10 users we decided to install their "Europe" drivers directly on the laptops and not distribute it over Active Directory.

Now to the problem: Our Xerox printer will not print MS Excel documents. The test page and print outs from IE or MS Word are fine. (For MS Word we needed to set a special parameter in order to change the size of the document automatically. But this feature is not available in the printer dialogue of Excel. We already tried to set the paper size of the Excel document to A4.

According to the manufacturer the printer should have a feature to automatically expand letter pages to A4. When we asked a Xerox technician why this is not working in this case then he replied that Excel is sending wrong information. It declares the document as A4 but is sending all the data (measurements) regarding the size letter.

Somehow I can not believe this. Did someone else have the same problem? The only "solution" I see is to print Excel documents first into PDF documents and then print those on the printer. But this is not really an acceptable solution.

Did anybody have a similar problem and found some "hidden" configuration parameter within Excel that could help me?

All laptops have Windows 7 and Office 2007.

From serverfault Raffael Luthiger

• One of my customer is an Italian subsidiary of an US company. They have no problem with autoresize function of HP laserjet and dey use Excel A LOT.

  You could try to print a PDF from Excel (using maybe PdfCreator http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/) and see if the problem persists.

  Raffael Luthiger : I already tried this and it does work. But since those users are on senior management level they want to have an easier solution. In other words they just want to press the print button. Let's see if someone else comes up with another solution.

  lrosa : Can you try with an HP LaserJet with Letter-A4 automatic conversion activated?

  Raffael Luthiger : Sadly there is no HP printer in this office. I will try first what torai suggested. Maybe this will help. Else I will have to search for one.
  From lrosa

• I have come across a similar problem with Xerox MFPs and Excel before. In Excel, go to Page Setup, make sure that the Page Size is correct and the Print Quality is set to 300dpi or 600dpi. For management, you can make a macro to set the DPI and then print. Add the macro to the Quick Access Toolbar.

  Raffael Luthiger : Interesting. I will try this. Do you know exactly what the problem is? The print quality is definitely something I did not check before. Maybe this helps. I will let you know.

  Raffael Luthiger : Sadly this did not work for me. We asked now for a technician from Xerox. I hope that they can help us.
  From Torai