Add Printers to the Mac’s Dock

In this video, we’re going to look at how we can add our printer to the dock, and then use drag and drop to print to that printer. Let’s see how we do this and why we would want to do this. Let’s go to my Mac. If we look at my Mac, here, you’re going to see I have a number of different screenshots on my desk, what I would like to do is I would like to print these. Now instead of opening them up individually, and then going to print that could take a lot of time I just go to the first one here, I open it up, I hit print, I quit, and then I go to the next one, open it up and quit, what I would like to do is I would just like to drag these to a printer and print them.

Well, we can easily do that by adding our printer to the dock. All we have to do is just open up our System Preferences. So I’m going to go to my Apple menu here. And then we go over to our System Preferences. From here, what we need to do is we need to go to our printers and scanners. When I select this, I’m going to see all of my different printers that I have on my network. So now what I want to do is I want to add my later j here to my dock, so then I can easily just select these and drag them down to my dock, and then it’ll print it. To do that, what we have to do is open up the print queue. When I open up the print queue, what it’ll do is it’ll open up that print queue in my dock. And then I can save it to where it’s always in my dock.

So it’s a two step process. So I’m going to go to Open print queue here. It opens up my print queue. But also if we look at my dock, I have my LaserJet there. Now if I were to quit out of my print queue, I’m going to quit out of here. What it does is it removes it also from the dock, I need to leave it in the dock. So let’s go ahead and open it up again. And now I go back over to my printer. And if I Control click on it, hold down the Control key and click, what you’re going to see is under options, the option to keep it in the dock. So now I select this, and it will always remain in my dock. So I’m just going to close this here. And now we can see it is still in my dock. Another way of adding a printer to your dock is by dragging the icon here or to the dock. I’m just going to drag this over to my dock. And now we can see it is added to my dock. So that’s another way of adding a printer to your dock. So now I have those printers added to my doc I want to print these documents here. Now all I need to do is just select them.

And then I just drag it over to the printer I want to use I’m going to go to my LaserJet here, I like go and we can see it added it to my queue. If I were to click on this, we can see that they are printing, I want to print them to my other printer. Again, I just select them, and then I just drag them to my other printer. And that’ll add it to that print queue. So that’s how we can add our printer I’m going to cancel these I don’t want to have them printing anymore. So that’s how we can add our printers to our dock and why we may want to add our printers to the dock.

Basically, it makes it really easy to print documents without opening up the document. All you have to do is just drag that document to the printer in your dock and it will automatically add it to the printers queue and start printing it. To add a printer to a dock you just open up your System Preferences, go to your printers and scanners preference pane and then open up the print queue. When you open up the print queue. You’ll see your printer and the dock. From there you just control click on it and then you can keep it in your dock. You can also drag the printer icon from your System Preferences, just drag it down to your dock. Once it has been added to your dock all you have to do is just drag any document that you want to print on to your printer icon. So that’s how we can add our printers to our dock and why we may want to add our printers to our dock on the Mac.