[Solved] Inability to print

[basebeginner]

I have OO3.2 on Windows 7 home premium. All apps seem to work perfectly (I use Write and Calc regularly and can print from them) and I have my address book in Base, but I cannot Print. I have tried printing from Design view, Report, Form, Query but all print icons are ghosted. In Options/Print my Epson printer is correctly displayed! What am I doing wrong, please?

[Villeroy]

A report is just an ordinary Writer document embedded in the database document. Are you saying that you can print stand-alone Writer documents but not embedded ones?
How about Calc? It is easy to use Calc as a report engine to get paper or PDF from database data.
[Tutorial] Using registered datasources in Calc You can import (copy) data from an unregistered database with simple drag&drop from the database window to a sheet cell.

[basebeginner]

Thanks for your reply Villeroy but unfortunately I don't understand it. Are you saying that it isn't possible to print directly from Base? My Address Book in Base has 150 records and 20 fields in the main database table. I have 3 subordinate tables (postal address only, telephone numbers only and email addresses only). I wish to print a selection from the postal address table. I have done a sort on the required field, and wish to print the first 35 records. How do I do that? The "print" icons are ghosted, and making queries, reports etc has no effect. I am stuck!

[r4zoli]

You can not print from table or query directly.
You needs to create report on you query, and print report.
Or register your database and drag and drop query results into writer doc or calc sheet, as suggested by Villeroy.

[Villeroy]

I have OO3.2 on Windows 7 home premium. All apps seem to work perfectly (I use Write and Calc regularly and can print from them) and I have my address book in Base, but I cannot Print. I have tried printing from Design view, Report, Form, Query but all print icons are ghosted. In Options/Print my Epson printer is correctly displayed! What am I doing wrong, please?

You should be able to print reports.

[basebeginner]

My thanks to r4zoli for the response. I have now done as you said and printed the report. Success - but what a pain! Why cannot Base be modified to make things easier for we old folk? What would be wrong with printing direct from the main table? In Calc it's a doddle. But THANkYOU.

[Villeroy]

It makes absolutely no sense to send raw data to a printer. A database can have many gigabytes of data and a record set can span over an arbitrary amount of columns.
In the context of this office suite you've got to import your wanted row set into a component which provides some page layout capabilities. You can choose between embedded Writer reports (3-clicks), normal Writer documents (drag&drop) and Calc (drag&drop).
I can not see what is difficult here.
Depending on the actual backend database in use you may also drag the row set onto a text table and then print the resulting text file from a text editor which also provides some text layout primitives for printing.