Is there a way to speed up/stop the Office 2010 programs from connecting to a networked printer without going to the 'print' menu?

I've read that the programs get the page setup options (such as margins etc) from the printer driver which, in our case, are all networked.

At the moment, when a user goes to change the page setup, all the options are greyed out, and cannot be changed (despite a printer being installed). The only way to get the options to show up is to go to the File > Print menu within the program. Here, the message "connecting to printer" changes to "ready". After this has happened, the page setup can then be changed.

I would assume the programs would try to connect to the printer as the program starts up, not before you would go to print something out?

The only way I can think of (other than installing a local printer) is to add a macro that runs on start up, to force the connection ... not sure if thats possible?