Many printers have very large buffers and have received several pages, or the entire document, before they’re done printing. If the document being printed isn’t listed, you can’t cancel it. Print doesn’t print, Cancel doesn’t cancel You can cancel printing a document if it shows up in the print queue: right-click on the document and click on the Cancel option. If there were multiple documents waiting to be printed, they would all be listed. Here’s the print queue for my (paused) printer after printing the Ask Leo! home page. Click on your printer in the list and click on Manage (in prior versions of Windows, you might need to double-click on the icon corresponding to your printer). You can view the print queue for each printer by opening the Settings app (or Control Panel, in prior Windows versions), and locating Printers & scanners or Devices and Printers. The process of adding a document to the queue, or sending it to the printer from the queue, is referred to as “spooling.” 1

Spoolers and queuesĮach printer on your system has its own print queue, managed by the system “Print Spooler” service. The result is an orderly print-out of each document, one after the other. When the printer is ready - perhaps after having completed printing a prior document - the next document in the queue is printed. Multiple programs can print to the queue at the same time Windows keeps track of which pages belong to which document.

When an application prints a document, it’s placed into the queue of documents to be printed. Windows handles this by creating what’s called a print queue. We want the documents printed in sequence, one after the other. Without some kind of organization, that could be a mess. You can run many applications on your computer at the same time, and they could all try to print at the same time. The problem is that sometimes the queue gets “stuck”, for lack of a better word. Once in the queue, Windows comes along and notices something needs to be printed, and sends it to the printer. When you print a document, it’s not sent directly to your printer. This happens too often, and you’d think Windows would have figured out how to handle it by now.

Google cloud print jobs stuck in queue