Green Print: Blog
Print Greener
Saturday 26th November '11
Printing greener from Microsoft 2007 / 2010 is always difficult however there are many different tools and easy ways to start to think about the way you can print greener.
Consider enhancing your Green Print credentials by
thoroughly investigating the View options within Microsoft© Word… precluding the need to
print at all!
Under the View tab [Word 2007/2010] you will find Full
Screen Reading with the option to view one or two pages, without the
distraction of toolbars, and to increase the size of the font (temporarily) for
the purposes of review. From this screen
you can make corrections – optionally redlining the changes.
If you have been used to paper drafts it will take a little
while to get used to reviewing text on screen, but there are cost savings to be
made on both paper and toner, together with the benefits for the environment.
An Inexpensive and
Practical Aid
Labelling of printer trays is a simple and inexpensive aid to
eliminating paper waste and contributing to your Green Print goals.
If everyone in the office takes responsibility for occasionally
replenishing the printer’s paper supply it can only help if the trays are
clearly labelled with the paper type. In
the case of letterhead it is also helpful to give guidance as to how it should
be loaded – e.g. “Logo facedown and to the back”.
PowerPoint©
Presentations
Your Green Print objectives may be severely undermined by
the print requirements of a PowerPoint©
presentation. Slides commonly contain
photographs and diagrams and often have a solid colour background - all of
which require a high density of toner when printed.
The multi-media elements of the presentation (animation,
video clips, background music or voiceover for example) will be lost on the
paper version. Why not consider burning
the presentation onto a CD in the original slide show format – or even as a DVD
video?
In the absence of the Office suite, PowerPoint© Viewer will need to be
installed in order to run the slide show.
This is a free download from Microsoft™
and for your client’s convenience you could include it on the same CD.
The Ribbon Comes of
Age
The introduction of the Microsoft
Fluent Interface(!) – or ribbon – was a radical and controversial change to the
look-and-feel of Office 2007. Microsoft® Office veterans were not only
faced with having to re-learn their hard-won navigational skills, but the
option of customising the toolbars had been removed. This popular feature is back in Office 2010.
If you feel it would be beneficial to rationalise the
glorious smorgasbord of functions and features shown on the ribbons, you can
make the changes via File | Options | Customize Ribbon. However if you choose to hide rarely-used
features there is the distinct possibility you never get around to using them –
and that would be a shame.
Print Preview
Taking a few moments to review your document in Print Preview
prior to printing can help achieve your Green Print goals by ensuring you’ve
correctly anticipated the position of the page breaks. For example checking a heading hasn’t been
unintentionally isolated from the succeeding paragraph, or a table split over
two pages. Moving a single page break will
result in the entire document being repaginated and might necessitate a
complete re-print.
Embedded instructions to ‘Keep with next’ (keep paragraphs
together on a page) and ‘Keep lines together’ (keep lines of a paragraph
together on a page) leave a small block next to the text – but these will not
be apparent unless you have the Hide/Show button (Ctrl + *) selected. As a rule of thumb: if there are page
breaks in unexpected places – select Hide/Show and check there are no small
blocks in the left margin.
For more information and help on reducing your carbon footprint and costs please contact us