Microsoft Outlook is Trying to use the printer macOS

A macOS client texted me yesterday about Microsoft Outlook trying to use the printer error. The user was trying to print to a personal HP printer connected over the network. He was only getting the printing error for this specific printer, but did not get the error when trying to print to his office’s main Xerox printers in the office.

Before taking on this Microsoft Outlook printing issue I had to wear my irregular bucket hat and brew some coffee from Honduras at home.

After researching I found the current user was not part of this “Print Operator”. This group is the _lpadmin group. The user is also a domain user, but this did not make a difference.

I found two ways to resolve this. See below. Both solutions you need to use our friend the Terminal.

Adding the user to the _lpadmin group:

sudo dseditgroup -o edit -a someuser _lpadmin

Adding the staff group(all macOS users belong to this group) to the _lpadmin group:

sudo dseditgroup -o edit -t group -a staff _lpadmin

To quickly check what groups your user is a member run this command:

id <user_name>
id paco

The above will display all groups the user is a member:

uid=501(rgm) gid=20(staff) groups=20(staff),12(everyone),61(localaccounts),79(_appserverusr),80(admin),81(_appserveradm),98(_lpadmin),33(_appstore),100(_lpoperator),204(_developer),250(_analyticsusers),395(com.apple.access_ftp),398(com.apple.access_screensharing),399(com.apple.access_ssh),400(com.apple.access_remote_ae),701(com.apple.sharepoint.group.1)

Hope this helps somebody. You can contact me if you have any questions. Also, check out my T-Shirt and coffee mugs store. I make my own designs. Thanks!