Chapter 9 Printing with a Chromebook
A Chromebook is designed to mostly work with files and documents online. The same is true if you want to print documents from a Chromebook. To print a document you will need to have a printer that is connected to the same wifi network as your Chromebook. If it is your personal printer you will need to follow the instructions that came with your printer to connect it to the wifi. If it is a work computer, make sure that the person responsible for the printer has enabled wifi-based printing.
You can then set up your Chromebook to print by first going to your avatar and clicking the settings icon as we have done before.
Open your settings.
You can then scroll down through all of the settings in the main menu until you see the word “Advanced”. Click on “Advanced” to see your more advanced settings including your printer settings.
Click on advanced.
You can scroll down again until you find the “Printing Settings” section and then click on “Printers”.
Click on printers.
On the next page you will be shown a list of available printers. If this is your first time setting up a printer there won’t be any available yet. Click “ADD PRINTER” to open the printer list.
Click on ADD PRINTER.
You will see a list of all the printers available on your current wifi network. You should make very sure that you are selecting the right printer name to match either your personal printer or your work printer. You may want to print something harmless the first time you print to be sure you have connected to the right printer. Find the name of the printer that you want and click the name, then “ADD”
Click the name of the printer, then ADD to add the printer.
You should then see the printer under the list of printers. You can click on the three dots next to the printer to remove it if you selected the wrong one.
The printer is now ready to be used.
To print something, navigate to a website, for example https://www.google.com/. Then you can use the command ctrl+p to print this page. Remember this means to hold the ctrl key and press p. You should come to the printing window. One option that is immediately available is for you to save the page to a pdf file on your local computer. This won’t print the file, but it can be a good way to get a pdf copy of a website onto your computer if you want to save it.
ctrl+p opens the printing window, you can save the page as a pdf by clicking save.
If you haven’t previously used a printer you will still need to do one more step to get ready to print. You can click on “Change” in the “Destination” section.
ctrl+p opens the printing window, click on change to change the printing destination.
Then you need to find the printer name again and click on it. This will make that the destination for your file to print to.
Click on the name of your printer
This will return you to the printing window where you will now see the printer listed under the destination. You can then click on the “Print” button to print your document.
Click on Print to print the document
This will send the file to your printer. One thing to note is that printing from a Chromebook can be tricky in some settings because if printers are behind security firewalls then they won’t appear among the options for you to print to. You may have to contact the person who manages printers to have them help set the printer up to be recognized by a Chromebook.