After your printers are installed, you are ready to configure your printing settings in Genie. You can configure the default print settings in Genie from File > Printing Preferences.

Mac:

Windows:

The Printing Preferences window will allow you to select from the printers available to the computer using the dropdowns next to each of the twelve print jobs in the list.

Note: If the printer you would like to select isn't shown in your dropdown lists, it either isn't installed or isn't installed properly. You should firstly ensure that the printer is definitely available on your machine and that you can print to it externally to Genie.

When the printer has been set, additional options such as the tray to print from can be set by clicking the Page Setup button (Mac) or Trays dropdown (windows).

Mac:

Windows:

If automatic tray selection doesn't work as expected on your printer, you should select the ‘Ask for Print Settings’ checkbox, so that it can be selected manually in the Print Dialogue window that appears. More on using this tick box later.

In the Printing Preferences window you will see the name of the computer you are using listed at the top as well as its IP address. To the right of this is a preference for ‘Separate Preferences for each Genie user on this computer’. This setting is particularly helpful for users accessing Genie in a Terminal Services (TS) environment, as well as, potentially, if multiple Genie users access this machine but they would prefer to have different printer and/or tray selections.

TS users need to have ‘Separate Preferences for each Genie user on this computer’ ticked because they are accessing different sessions on what is essentially the same machine. The setting allows each individual user’s preferences to be respected. Further to this, there is a checkbox in the Practice Preferences > Clinical tab to 'Set Printing by User Name' which drastically simplifies the logic involved in printing in a TS environment.

Please note: when 'Set Printing by User Name' is ticked, this will clear out the current printing preferences for Genie on the machine and these will need to be reset.

‘Always Print to Default Printer’ at the bottom of the Printing Preferences window, as the name suggests, will ensure your system ignores any Genie settings and instead only uses the printer that is set as the default on your computer.

DVA Claims: This will print a form for the patient to sign when submitting a DVA claim.

Medicare DB4: This will print a form for the patient to sign when submitting a Medicare claim.

Offsite Printer: This is the printer that can be specified if the computer is being used away from the network (Genie Solo).

Adjust Print Area: The four green and blue arrows at the bottom left of this window are used to adjust the position of printed text on prescriptions, this does NOT apply to any other document types.

The ‘Ask for Print Settings’ tick box which appears to the right of the print jobs in the Printing Preferences window enables the printer’s interface to appear after you opt to print from Genie. Once the print button or printer icon has been clicked within Genie, another series of windows will appear that are generated by the printer software outside Genie. These windows will allow you to specify not only different printers but, if available, different trays at the time of printing. The settings you specify only relate to the print job when you clicked on the print button, however, if the ‘Ask for Print Settings’ box remains ticked, the windows will reappear the next time the particular document type is printed.

Plain A4 and Letters will always open the Print Dialogue window when printing, therefore this option is not available for these documents. Note: If you would like to select ‘Ask for Print Settings’ for all types of documents at the same time, Alt+click on the first checkbox and Genie will automatically select all of them.

It can be a very useful tick box to ensure that if the printer settings you want to use change regularly, you can ensure the right settings have been selected. Another benefit of having this setting ticked is as a ‘speedbump’ to sending something to the printer. For example, if you have selected to print something from Genie when you didn’t mean to, having the printer interface window appear will give you an opportunity to cancel or alter the print job before it sends to the printer.

If this sounds like it will slow you down or annoy you, it may suit you better to have ‘Ask for Print Settings’ unticked on any of the print jobs you like.

Having ‘Ask for Print Settings’ ticked also means that if you would prefer to print to PDF for print jobs, you can choose to do so either by selecting from the PDF dropdown to ‘Save as/print to PDF’ in the printer interface window (Mac) or selecting a PDF printer that you have installed on your Windows machine.

More on printing to PDF in the next section.

For now, once you have chosen your printing preferences, don’t forget the final step, which is to save them by clicking the Save Preferences button at the bottom of the printing preferences window.