Payslips: Customizing tractor-feed page-size in Windows printouts   (Wed Dec 26 2007)

Most of my clients produce sealed payslips. You've seen them before. The top copy shows only the employee's name and department. When you tear open the paylip you get the full details on the carbon copy. And usually there's a bottom copy for the file.

On the whole, the sealed payslip is a good thing. It's great for payroll security. It cuts out the mindless task of stuffing hundreds of envelopes each month. And, if you're into antique technology, it means you can still use your noisy old impact printer.

But until today, I've always hated them. Why? Because the tractor-feed, pre-printed paper is always a non-standard size. Sort of, but not quite A5. And never one of the size options offered as standard by the printer manufacturer. So what happens? You print the first payslip and its fine. You print the second and it's a few centimetres lower on the sheet, and the employee's name slips out of the carbonated area. Print three and your totals are beginning to appear on the next page.

In the end, I always found a way to fix it, juggling with the settings on my page design, setting column spacing in the printer set-up. And we always took careful note of the settings, in case anything went wrong later. As it invariably did.

It went wrong today because one of my clients client had installed a new Windows version on all computers over the holiday period, and wiped out all the settings. So what were the settings? Nobody knew. The person who was keeping them safe left the business 3 years ago.

It all began to get pretty frustrating. I did what I could with the design. No good. I tried to check the printer manual. It was a pdf - and there was no Adobe Acrobat installed. So I downloaded it, and then of course found that IT had denied access to downloaded material. And there was no-one around with the authority to grant permission.

So I did what I should have done 10 years ago. Checked the web to find out whether anyone else was having the same problem.

They were, and the fix is really simple.

It turns out that all you have to do - on Windows anyway - is open up Printers and Faxes on the Control Panel. Then without selecting a printer, select Server Properties from the File sub-menu. In the dialog box that pops up, check the Create a new form box. Give your new form a name - 'Payslip' would do the trick - and enter the dimensions you want. Apply, and you're done.

So then go back to the payslip again in your database, and when you check the available printer settings, your newly created Payslip format will appear as one of the options. Print 500 perfectly-sized payslips, and rejoice.

Filed under: HR