Recently, our principal posted some staggering statistics regarding printer usage in our school (~1500 students, over 100 faculty members, 35-40 printers). Since the beginning of the school year, we have printed over 210,000 pages = 430 reams. (This is only for printers and NOT for copiers).
With the price of paper increasing, it is important to cut costs by reducing printing. The following tips go beyond being stingy about what actually needs to be printed (i.e. not printing every e-mail message, reusing handouts, etc).
Copy from E-mail. Most e-mail message have uneccessary junk and/or useless forwarded information. To prevent printing this, simply copy the important information in your message, paste it into a word processing program, then print it out.
Choose Selection to Print. This is especially important for printing from webpages. Simply highlight the areas of the webpage that you would like to print, and select ‘Print’ from the file menu. A pop-up box should appear that gives you some options for printing (NOTE: if you select the printer icon, this may bypass this screen, and the computer will print directly to the default printer). From the ‘Page Range’ option, choose ‘Selection’ before you print.
Shrink to Fit. There is an option within the ‘Print Preview’ pane that allows you to shrink your document to fit the paper size. This is perhaps handiest when you have a page ‘and a little bit extra’ (alternatively. you can fuss with font size and margins to fit your content on one page).
Pages Per Sheet. This is a very handy option when you have a very large document with many pages. When you are ready to print the document, select ‘Print’ from the file menu. When the print box appears, you can select ‘Pages Per Sheet’ before you print. I would suggest no more than 2 pages per sheet if you plan on reading it.
