Print button grayed out after editing Excel sheet. Changing printers and then changing back fixes it.

So it looks like this might not be 100% Microsoft's issue. We've found that if we disable Adobe Acrobat's PDFMaker.OfficeAddin COM add-in in Excel and then close and reopen Excel, everything works just fine after that. We're seeing this across multiple builds of Excel, and the only commonality is the fact that disabling the COM add-in fixes the issue. None of us actually have the paid version of Adobe Acrobat, so this add-in is useless to us, but it seems like this could cause issues for others, so it still needs to be resolved.

I can confirm this aswell. Today we had the first report from an effected user. Disabling the PDFMaker.OfficeAddin and restarting Excel fixed the issue immediately.

Thank you!

Greetings EhronW,

Have you tried to restart the spooling service, for some printing error this resolution works just fine, and I had similar cases like this and it worked for me.

Sometimes may rehappen but, at least, not for every print.

Yes, we tried that. We did all the troubleshooting steps. As you can see from this thread, it is a widespread issue, not a simple local fix.

We have a client who is having the same issue. We were able to confirm the issue is only happening when doing File > Print. Using Control + P or changing the printer to something else and then back both work.

Hello Ehron,

Thanks for your details.

It's weird...I assume Microsoft’s support team will need to step in. A technical support engineer can perform a remote session to collect necessary logs to further analyze. If the issue requires further attention, they can escalate it to a specialized team for deeper analysis. If you would like to find a cause for this, time for them to be involved.

As forum moderators, we don’t have access to the detailed logs or backend systems needed to troubleshoot this effectively due to privacy and security constraints. For that reason, the most efficient solution would be to contact Microsoft’s support team directly. 

Clover-L - MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist.

Sounds as if there is an issue with the printer driver itself and/or the printer network.

The difference between File/Print and CTRL+P is that the dialog shows some more options. But Excel must be determine this options first, therefore the printer driver is called. And when there is no answer, the options/buttons are grayed out.

If you press CTRL+P we can assume that "the critical part" is skipped.

Try File/Print and wait 10 minutes, then try to change an option and see if the behaviour changes. If so there is a delay / bad answer in the printer network.

Andreas.