How to delete documents in my printing queue

This post will help you get rid of pending documents that remain in your printer’s queue, which can become a very uncomfortable situation. We will have to waste paper sheets and time, maybe even ink, to fix this problem.

Sometimes, a document is coming out through the printing tray and we realize this is not the page or the document we wanted to print in the beginning, or that it’s simply not looking good and we need to cancel the entire file. Therefore, we head to the printer queue and cancel it, but the document stays there.

We choose to restart the computer and, once it’s back on, we see the document hasn’t left the queue. This can be so annoying we can start thinking printers are conspiring against us, even if we know this isn’t true.

This can be caused by two things: either the printer’s input card is worn out, or the cable that sends information to the printer from the PC is too old. As you can see, this is a communication problem between the computer and the printer.

In order to remove this document from the printing queue, the same one that isn’t allowing the printer to print anything else until this one’s done, all we need to do is get rid of any form of communication that may exist between the printer and the queued document on the computer. Here are the steps you must follow to eradicate this problem.

Follow the steps exactly as they’re described ahead to obtain the best possible outcome of this tutorial.

The solution to this issue starts now
This is a very simple procedure. All we need to know is our printer’s model, which is also very easy to find out. Once you’ve obtained this piece of information, you must go to the following locations on your computer:

Go to Start Menu, click on Control Panel and then on Printing Devices. There, you will right-click on the printer with the queued documents.  You will be able to identify this printer right away since it will show the amount of pending documents in the bottom-right corner, or just by hovering on the printer’s icon.

You must now open this printer and see the documents that are on queue, and then click on Cancel All Documents on the window that will show up onscreen.

This next image will show you how and what to click on Control Panel to set a default printer on your computer.

panel control in star menu

This next image will show you how and what to click on Control Panel to set a default printer on your computer.

hardware and sond

This other image shows how to identify Printing Devices in your Control Panel menu.

The next picture will illustrate how to establish a printer of our choosing as the default one after identifying our printer’s model.

select you printer

Once you’ve hovered over the printer, as previously indicated by us, we’ll be able to identify which printer has documents on queue and proceed to right-click on it, opening the window that will let us see these files.

printing now

Here is the window we’ve been looking for, where we’ll detect the exact file that’s causing all this trouble. This is the route you must follow from now on:

Click on the lower-left part of the window, right where it says Printer / Cancel All Documents. Do this once more exactly where it says Printer / Cancel All Documents.

Disconnect the USB cable and connect it once more if the document is still in queue; you must wait about a minute. Disconnect the power cord that feeds the printer.

If the problem persists, remove all the paper sheets from the tray and restart the computer.

This must have solved the queued documents issue in our printers, which will stop printing these files. Its LED indicators will also stop blinking and asking for more paper sheets.

This post is based on information we’ve compiled in our workshop. We’ve executed this same procedure and it has worked perfectly on our printers. If you have any other question or know of a better solution for this issue, please post a comment in the section below.