Printing Program for Word files

[TeamPlayer22]

My current occupation is an assistant for a practicing doctor. One of my tasks is sorting and printing the charting notes that this doctor creates for each patient visit. This doctor uses a personal template he has created in Microsoft Word 2013 as a skeleton for each of his charting notes. Each individual charting Word file is labeled as so: Last name of patient, First name  Date of visit. The number of notes for each person varies depending on how long the person's stay was.

 

Here's my issue. These charting notes are produced at a large rate and my current printing method feels inefficient and way to prone to human error. My current printing method is as follows:

1. Open file explorer to the area where all the charting notes are organized into sub-folders by month they were made. Select the desired month.

2. Click and highlight the all the notes that were made for an individual person in that month. Right click on the selected files and click Print. This will print those selected files, but they will come out in a random order from the printer.

3. Repeat step 2 for the all the charting notes for each individual in that months folder.

 

The outcome of all this is a printer tray with a stack of semi-organized patient charting notes. Each individual's group of charting notes will be together in the stack, but they will be in a random order. As said before, each file has the date of the visit on the end of it to keep the files organized. When they come out of the printer the files that were highlighted and selected to be printed together will come out in the same section of the stack, but their order will be randomized. I don't know why this happens.

The printer spooler also only seems to have so much space. Sometimes there's over a hundred files for a single person that needs to be printed but the highlight and print method only allows for about a maximum of about 54 files to be highlighted at a time before it just seems to not register the files after that and doesn't print them. This is also why I can't just highlight all the files in a folder and print them at once. If I did, people's charting notes would be mixed, and most of them wouldn't print anyway.

 

So here's what I'm asking.

Would anyone know of a program that can make this printing process easier? Something where I could open it, select all the files I wanted to print, hit print, and it would keep the order of the files as they are in Windows Explorer. Or a setting I can change in Windows to make this all simpler.

 

Printer: Brother Black only Laser Printer

 

I wasn't sure which forum to ask this question at but this community seemed like the best place to start. Thanks in advance for any help.

[kb5zue]

Are you waiting until the last day of the month to take care of this task (Sometimes there's over a hundred files for a single person)?  That is a LOT of printing.  Instead of waiting until I was too far behind the power curve, I would start the job a little sooner.  Good Luck.

[TeamPlayer22]

Not quite, the doctors releases the files in batches at the end of each month. They do this in case the want to make any alterations to them before releasing them. Once they're released I download them directly to my computer so I don't have to print off the server. The printer is connected directly to my computer. When I tried printing off the server there was a huge delay and it slowed me way down.

[Guest]

You could write a script. This is a quick example that is done with a mix of python and sudo code

# Some sudo code
import subprocess
  
patientName = input("What do the files start with?")

list = []

# Insert some code/script here that gets every file that starts with what you typed and stores it in a list

for index in range(len(list)):
  subprocess.Popen(["C:\\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\winword.exe", f"C:\Path\{index}", "/mFilePrintDefault", "/mFileExit"]).communicate()

 

[LogicalDrm]

So what you are looking for is printing manager. Have you looked at how Windows stock works? I haven't in that extend, but just changing file order in that could do it. Or if they use secure printing there, you can do same with Canon/HP integrated manager at the spot. Or if they have web interface, from that.