Word 2013 - Landscape / Portrait issue, Word forces portrait on landscape layout

Question

I'm running Windows10 on Dell XPS laptop.

I've just bought a label printer from Dymo - the Labelwriter 450. It works great except...

If a label orientation is a conventional portrait layout then all is fine, Word 2013 behaves fine. What I mean by "conventional" is that the width of the label aligns to the printing width of the printer and the length of the label as it emerges is longer than the width. The same as any ordinary desktop printer.

However, some label stock, the length of the label is shorter than the width. Word 2013 determines this is a landscape page. Which is fine to type up the label details, but the printer then prints conventionally landscape too - which means the print is 90 degrees wrong in orientation.

I tried setting a "Custom" paper size in Word, with the width wider than length and setting it as portrait, but Word then decides it's a portrait and presents on screen a conventional portrait layout, so that's not a solution.

I've had three rounds with the Dymo helpdesk and whilst they are trying to resolve the issue, It's not a conversation that's leading to a solution.

(Dymo do provide add-ins for their printer, they work, but are clunky and I just want to treat the printer as a normal printer and get rid of the add-ins, to the office apps clean)

Any ideas welcome -

Steve

Answer 1

Yes, Word can give trouble because it "knows" what the printer can do...

Here is a work-around:

Put the text and other items to be printed in a Text Box (from the Insert tab). Then rotate that box 90 degrees. Word will now print it the way you want. There are two ways to rotate it:

1. grab the handle above the centre of the text box (hold down the shift key to make it easier to select 90 degrees)
2. click the Format tab, and then Rotate, where you can select 90 or 180 degrees.

Answer 2

I have two offices installed on my computer. I create the document and make page setup in office 2003 exactly as you said - landscape with width less than height. And this document you can edit as you like and in office 365 and it prints OK until you want to change page setup. Here you must return back to office 2003 because the office 365 resets page orientation to portrait