I just received an important document through email which I need at my office desk early morning. Currently I am hanging out with my friends and I just send a print request to my office printer (simple wired inkjet printer) to print a copy of that document. Yes, even from 1,000 miles away, I can print on remotely located printers of mine without paying any charges. So who needs a wireless printer if you have the power of clouds. Wireless printers got email IDs to get print request from anywhere. Anyway, without investing much in advance wireless printers with own email ID, Using Google Cloud Printing I was able to print that document on office printer from my Inbox on Android phone. Same can be done from other smartphones as well ex. iPhone, BlackBerry etc. So for printing a document on your own printer, your location doesn’t matter now.
Here is what I did to enable Google Cloud Print on my computer and how it got connected to my wired printer.
How to Enable Cloud Print and Connect Printer
First of all you need to install Google Chrome browser to get Cloud Print working. Apart from being the faster web browser, Chrome is having other powers like Web Apps, Development Tools, Bookmark Synchronization and Cloud Print option. Once you installed the Chrome browser, navigate to Settings icon on top-right corner and select “Options” from there.
On Chrome’s Options page, you can see a tab named “Under the hood“. Click on that and scroll down till the end. There you can see “Google Cloud Print”. You need to sing in with Google Account to get started with Cloud Print. It is important to know that all the printers connected to your computer on which you are performing this activity will be available in Google Cloud Print. You can remove the automatically added printers from the Cloud Print by performing that action on Cloud Print Settings page. I will let you know more about that later in this post.
Once you sign in with Google Account on Cloud Print, you will see a new window showing all the printers connected to your computer. Check whether the printer is properly connected and turned on while enabling the Google Cloud Print. Wait for few seconds as its takes some time for Google to find and add all printers.
[ad id=’7′ style=’float:left;margin:10px 10px 10px 0′]Now your printer is appearing in the Cloud Print Settings page, you can start testing that. Use any Smartphone like Android, iPhone, BlackBerry or Nokia’s Smartphones to open Gmail.com which is having option to print through Google Cloud Print. Currently the Google Cloud Print is available for Gmail for Mobile, Google Docs for Mobile and Chrome OS. Once you open Gmail on your mobile browser, you can see a drop-down on top-right corner where you need to select “Print” option from the list. It will show you the list of printers from Cloud Print which available to print the mail. Select your printer on which you want to print the job. As you are doing these things using your mobile phone, you can issue the command from anywhere in the world. That print job will be submitted on Google Cloud Print and your desktop printer will start printing that email. Done.
In case your printer is OFF at that time, the print job will remain in queue and will get printed when the printer will turn ON. If your computer is offline then also the job will remain in queue. Once the printer and computer will come online, print job will automatically start.
Google is also working to let you share the printer with your friends, colleague and team. Once that will be active, you will be able to share the printer in just a click so that other can also send their print jobs on your printer. This is very useful in office environment.
I hope you will enjoy printing on your static/wired printers using your wireless devices like Android, BlackBerry, iPhone mobile phones.