Outlook 2003 : Fix clipping of emails when printed

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From the computer of: seamonkey420 (132 recipes)
Created: Aug 11, 2007     Updated: Aug 14, 2007

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Well, if you've dealt with Outlook on a daily basis for a while, you will notice that there are several weird quirks you occassionally run into. One of my users prints a ton of emails each day from Outlook 2003. The user one day noticed that their printouts started to get clipped on the right side whenever an email was printed. Here's what fixed the problem.

When I ran into this problem at work, it took me several days to track down a fix. Here are the symptoms.

You print any email no matter if its a text or html email and the right or left side is clipped (like the margins are set outside of the paper width). However most likely your margins are properly set in Outlook. These steps will help you resolve that (hint, IE is the culprit!)

1. First thing to check, of course, is that the Margins are set properly in Outlook itself. Go to File > Print Setup > Memo style.

2. Click on the Paper tab and check to make sure the margins are set to the default .50 for all items. Most likely the margins in Outlook 2003 are fine.

3. Open up Internet Explorer. Check the margins (File > Page Setup) and set them also to the default .75 for all items.

4. Try printing the email and it hopefully will print fine! It seems that IE is integrated into Outlook and thus will affect printing since i would assume its used for showing emails.

Notes:
-if you use Word as your email editor (option in Tools > Options) and this does not resolve your printing woes. I would open up Word 2003 and then open up the Normal.dot file (Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates) and check the Margins. If they were off or weird, change them and save the Normal.dot file in Word.