Anyone who works or has worked in an office environment has come up against this problem at some point or another.  You create a document in a feverish frenzy, send it to the printer with a flourish, and go stand by the industrial monolith to await the hard copy of your genius.

And wait.

There’s no telling how many times you’ll try to reprint before you finally realize that you neglected to change back to your “usual” printer after some other anomalous print job.  And while the worst case scenario is having to rescue a hapless coworker from the pile of copies you sent to the “wrong” printer next to his desk, it’s still a time-consuming and frustrating error.  As such, I’m sure you’ll be thrilled to hear there’s a free program that will render this irritating gaffe obsolete.

Enter Automatic Printer Switcher from Computed Synergy! This program runs in the background of Windows to redirect print jobs according to your every whim.  You simply download and run the program, open the other programs whose print jobs you wish to control, and use the handy interface to pair program with printer.  With a few clicks of a mouse, Word documents will print in your office, Excel spreadsheets will become PDFs, and that funny email forward from Aunt Mabel or your plane tickets to Maui will emerge from that printer in the corner that your boss can’t see.

I encourage you to give it a try.  If nothing else, the poor guy who gets buried in the avalanche of mistaken reprints will thank you.

For more control over how you print, check out this entry about a bookmarklet that lets you print selections from your web browser!