W2 Printing

[TheBigZ]

Say you have a batch of 50 W2's. So you print 25 pages of red 2ups, and they appear to print in an order sorted by last name. Your printer miscues a couple pages in the middle of the batch, so you need to reprint just a page or two. If I choose the start & stop record of the two employees on a given page that was not printed correctly, I don't seem to get just that page. I get 9 pages of employees that are sorted by last name, but it's not the 2 employees I want to reprint on a single page. They were on a single page when I printed them all, so why not when I choose them as the start & stop record? Am I explaining that well?
I guess the underlying question is why would the sort be different when it prints them all vs when I choose a start & stop record? Shouldn't the 7th & 8th employee in the sorted print list, always be 7th & 8th whether I'm print them all or just printing the 7th & 8th?

[Paul Mayer]

As I recall, the start and stop only works with order by employee ID. My suggestion since you printed the others is to print just each employee selecting their ID that you need. Also with 50 employees, you might look at the add-on tool W2Express as it will print the forms on plain paper for the employees and your copy and submit the forms to the SSA on-line.

[Paul Mayer]

Just had another idea too. Do a Print Preview and save to PDF and then in Adobe Acrobat, give a start page and end page to print the range you need in the same order.

[TheBigZ]

Yeah.... except Acrobat pretty much ignores the formatting and it doesn't line up on the red W2's. So between this one, and the W2's I'm going to have to reprint from that W3 issue in the other thread, I see myself having to order more W2 stock. Joy.
I just don't get why the program seems to do some things that are really the same task, two different ways, depending on where you do them from. If I'm printing all the W2's, it sequences them a given way and then prints them. If I want a range, it sequences them in a completely unrelated way, so there's no possible way to choose a range that has any relevance. If it's adding up the wages for a quarter, it calls a routine to do that. If it's adding up wages for a year, it calls a completely different routine that does it a different way. Clearly God knew what he was doing when he didn't make me a programmer. ;)

[Paul Mayer]

In checking, the routines are the same. The only problem I could find was in employees with the same name but different middle initials. Like John Z Smith and John A Smith as they were randomly displayed.

The next build will sort by Last Name, First Name, Middle Initial. To make it easier, the Range Selection will also display the middle initials as well.

[TheBigZ]

In checking, the routines are the same. The only problem I could find was in employees with the same name but different middle initials. Like John Z Smith and John A Smith as they were randomly displayed.

The next build will sort by Last Name, First Name, Middle Initial. To make it easier, the Range Selection will also display the middle initials as well.

Excellent. It will be nice to have the range function have some more diverse & functional uses.

[Paul Mayer]

It was released yesterday, the developers researched this extensively and the problem with the range selection is that it cannot select multiple items for the range. To select a range of names which I asked for like "First, Last, and Middle Initial" is not possible as those are three separate items and you cannot perform a range selection on that. But they were able to sort the result selected range results by the selected sort option which now will sort by the order I mentioned above.

In light of what we discovered above, if you have a printer that is known to have paper jambs it is best to sort by Employee ID or social security number if you have employees with the same last names.

[TheBigZ]

It was released yesterday, the developers researched this extensively and the problem with the range selection is that it cannot select multiple items for the range. To select a range of names which I asked for like "First, Last, and Middle Initial" is not possible as those are three separate items and you cannot perform a range selection on that. But they were able to sort the result selected range results by the selected sort option which now will sort by the order I mentioned above.

In light of what we discovered above, if you have a printer that is known to have paper jambs it is best to sort by Employee ID or social security number if you have employees with the same last names.

Hmm. How about the ability to "create a list" of who to print? Like let me choose Frank, then choose Bill, and then choose Mary. And it will print just those 3 (or however many I choose). I don't know, I guess it's not something that comes up often enough to spend a lot of time on. It's just that when it DOES come up, it's a pain to deal with.

The printer doesn't jam often. And this occurrence likely had more to do with the red stock than the printer. It drew up multiple pages that overlapped, so it printed across 2 pages. And since this was so many W2's at one time, it did it twice in the run. I'm trying to "fan" the pages more before I print to try to prevent this from happening again.

[Paul Mayer]

Unfortunately the way the report tools work, you can't just select a list to print.

I had that same overlapping problem a few years ago. It only happened in the Winter and was caused by the dry heat. What I did was to put a vaporizer in the office and let it run for a few hours before printing. I know you are laughing right now, but it fixed the problem. :-)

[TheBigZ]

Not at all. Gets dry around here in the winter. I could see where running a vaporizer would definitely reduce the static cling.