Access Report Margin Problem

While using Access 2003 to create a report to print on 4" x 6" labels on my SATO GL 408e label printer, I ran across some very strange problems with margins.

I had created a custom paper size in the print driver on my print server (called custom stock in SATO lingo) and things seemed to be OK as I could see the new paper size in Access. The problems started when I tried to adjust the report margins to use as much of my label real estate as possible. The margins I set for top, left, and right would "stick" but the bottom margin kept resetting itself to 20.02 mm each time I left the page setup form. This was resulting in a large amount of unusable space at the bottom of each label.

Access 2007 was showing the exact same behaviour. Strangely, Word 2007 was not showing this behaviour and would allow me to select the custom paper size and print on the entire label. It seemed to be an issue related to Access.



After some banging of heads on walls, we stumbled across a setting in the print driver that solved the problem. On the "Printer Settings" tab the bottom section is titled "Override Application Default Settings". The field within is called "Always use drivers settings" and this needed to be set to true. I have no idea why this fixed the issue but it did and I am documenting in case this is of help to someone else!