Adding Printers To Your Dock

You can add printer icons to the Dock to make it easier to print documents with drag-and-drop. You can also quickly access the printer cue and settings. This is particularly handy if you work with multiple printers.

Video Transcript: There are a lot of different ways you can print a document. You can, of course, open it up in the app and then go File, Print from within the app. Or, without ever even opening the app, you can select the file and do File, Print or just Command P. So you can select the file and then Command P to print it. Now these are really easy ways. But if you like to drag and drop there's a way that you can drag and drop to your printer.
So to get this you need to go to System Preferences. Then in System Preferences go to Printers and Scanners. Here you should see a list of your available printers. Now what a lot of people don't know is you can drag this. You can drag it and you could put it on the Desktop or you could put it in the Dock. So I'm going to stick it in the Dock here just on the left side. So you stick it with the applications here on the left side of the Dock. You can see a little picture of my printer. You might not be so lucky that it comes up with an actual picture of your printer. Mine does have that icon in there. I've got that printer there now.
Now I can quit System Preferences and when I want to print something I can drag it to that printer and drop it there. So this is really handy especially if you have multiple printers. You can have them all lined up in your Dock and then drag to the printer that you want to it print from. It's pretty quick action. Now you can do this with any file that prints natively. You know just like the RTF TextEdit document here. You can do it with an image. Drag and drop there. Then you can easily print those documents.
But another thing you can do with this, that you can't do normally you know through a keyboard shortcut or anything, is get to the printer list of what it's doing. So I can actually click on this instead of dragging and dropping to it and when I do that it opens up that printer. You can get to that through System Preferences of course. But it's really quick and easy to do that. I can see here that, since I have the printer turned off so everything kind of clogs up there so we can take a look at it, you can see I've got my items there that I'm printing. I could pause one and let this other one go ahead of it. I can cancel one by hitting the X button. I can get to Settings. I can pause the entire printer. 
Any time I want I can click there just to go and see what the printer is doing. So you can see the advantage to having your printer, especially if you have more than one, lined up in the Dock. Drag and drop to them. Open them easily to see what they're up to and be able to pause and cancel print jobs.

Comments: 2 Responses to “Adding Printers To Your Dock”

Marianne Guillois

5 years ago

Have been using the shortcut on the desktop for years but thanks to your video now all is done from the toolbar - just love it ;). One thing though is there a way to set up the printer to use last settings when used from the toolbar/desktop short cut. I would like to drag a bunch of PDF to print 2 pages side by side. Currently can do it but on a per one basis with Command + P with Last used settings selected.

Gary Rosenzweig

Marianne: So you are saying that the last settings are used when you Command+p to print, but not from the shortcut? I don't know of any way to change that. Best to stick with Command+p when you need that then.

Comments Closed.

Adding Printers To Your Dock

Comments: 2 Responses to “Adding Printers To Your Dock”

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