How can I prevent Word/Excel from trying to reach the printer?

Question

Whenever I perform certain operations in Word or Excel (2007), these applications are trying to reach the printer. I work on a laptop at work and at home. When I'm at home (not connected to my work's printer), I sometimes have to wait many seconds for Word/Excel to become responsive after performing operations such as making a cell bold in Excel, or pasting a paragraph from a webpage to Word. In Word I may have a small message at the bottom saying something like "Trying to connect to the printer, press Esc to abort". Sometimes if I do press Esc, Word crashes. Is there a workaround?

Answer 1

When at home try the following:

>Go to the main search bottom at the bottom left desktop.

>Type printer and when the control panel printer area comes up, choose printers and scanners.

> Choose any PDF type printer , click once on it and choose manage and then choose to make it the default printer.

>>This will make the connection from your work computer not effective when you're at home.

>>And when you're back at work you can repeat the process find your work printer and make it the default again for when you're there.

If you have any issues please ask a follow up question.