The Zen of Modern Printing

After six weeks focusing on printing, I have come to a realization about printing on paper in a world of instant digital communications: do less the old way, but more the smart way. We're not finished with printing, even 570 years after Gutenberg invented movable type, or 11 centuries after the Chinese printed with carved woodblocks. Information on paper still drives us, despite the promise of Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPad.

How To Master Excel Spreadsheet Printing

You slave over cell after cell after cell in your spreadsheet until it's perfect. When it comes time to print out that perfection, you get blank pages, missing sections, and weird formatting. You can blame your printer, but the problem is almost always in Excel. Jen Darr of PC Helps sent the details for this lesson.

How To Create Impact with Colored Paper

Teachers use this trick, and Hollywood productions have an elaborate set of rules for this. Yes, a seemingly minor detail like changing the color of a few pages of a proposal can make a huge impact. The words matter most on a proposal, of course, but putting important information on different colored paper magnifies that impact.

How To Create a New Print Style for Outlook

This tip comes from Jen Darr of PC Helps Support and will make sure you know what you're getting when you hit Print inside Outlook. Jen offers great advice on how to create a new print style with a different page size for your Outlook printouts. While I discourage printing e-mail as a matter of course, many times you do need to print something, so you may as well create the output that works best for you.

How To Ease Into Document Management

Small business owners and managers have a common reaction when someone, usually a salesperson, suggests going paperless and jumping into electronic document management: they cover their ears, start screaming “la la la I can't hear you,” and run out of the room. So don't say “electronic document management” but say “use our scanner to reduce clutter and save money.” Bosses pull their hands away from their ears when they hear “save money” and you can leverage the scanner on your MFP to ease into document management, I mean, reduce clutter.

How To Save Money Proofing Color Pages

Working on complex color documents means wasting time and paper trying to make the beauty you see on the screen translate to a beautiful page coming out of your printer. Even when you have a low cost per color page, each mistake, er, step on the path to perfection, costs money. Here's one way to keep proofing without costing a fortune.

How To Setup a Printer Pool

Too many companies panic when one printer goes down. If your company relies heavily on one printer, and no printing means no work gets done, it's time to jump into the printer pool. Hint: you don't have to take your clothes off for a dip in the printer pool.

How To Leverage the Tactile Lure of Good Paper

Last time we mentioned printing with reduced margins for internal use, with a warning not to cut corners on materials for clients. Save a penny, lose a project? Not a good idea. Today let's talk about leveraging the tactile lure of high quality paper to reel in business.

How To Pack More On A Printed Page

One idea to help save some money on printing came from Jim Lippie of Staples Network Services in response to reading this series. His idea? Reduce the size of the margins on your pages, effectively increasing the number of words you can print. Good idea, so let's see where it's appropriate.

How To Print Without a Computer

Everyone grew up with personal printers attached to personal computers, so we naturally believe a computer must be part of the printing equation. Like so many things we learned growing up, that truth has “matured” to the point it's almost an untruth. There are at least two easy ways to print on many modern printers without a computer: memory card reader slots, and PictBridge.