Printing to HP or Dell printers produces pages of nonsense garbage characters in output wasting paper

Question

When I try to print a document in Word to a Dell or HP Printer, all I get are pages of garbage characters which is a total waste of paper. What's going on?

Answer

There are 3 situations where this can occur

1. The file name is too long. Yes, you heard right. HP and Dell printers have problems printing files if the file names are too long. To be safe, keep all file names 16 characters or less.
2. There is corruption in the original Word file. To fix this, select all, copy, create a new word file, paste, save. Try printing page 1 to 1 and see if that fixes it. If this doesn't work, save the new document as text only. Then quit out of Word and reopen the text only document. You'll have to reformat the file, but the corrupted code should now be gone.
3. You have an incorrect or out of date printer driver installed for the printer. You would have to go to the manufacturer of the printer in question to download the correct or updated printer driver.