If you think buying a printer is a one-time cost, think again. Spending on
hardware maintenance, paper and toner cartridges can, over time, amount to more
than five times the cost of the printer itself. Here are some tips to save on
some of these costs.
Preview before printing. Remember to preview your document before
printing to see if the complete document fits into the page. If it doesn’t,
then adjust the margins. Most office suites and graphics software have the print
preview feature under File.
Fit to page. In Excel to fit the data to a page, go to File>Page
setup>Page. Adjust the page width and preview the page.
Set page range. You may need to print only five pages of a much longer
document. You can do that by setting the page range.
Most office suites have this feature under the Print option.
To avoid getting reams of blank Excel sheets when printing, select the area
you want the print of and in the Print menu, click on ‘Print Selection’.
In PowerPoint, print multiple slides per page. Also, select the ‘Scale to
fit’ and ‘Grayscale’ options.
Print HTML pages’ printable versions. When printing an HTML page,
you often end up with a printout in which some text and images have been cut
off. To avoid that, take a print of the printable version.
If the page doesn’t have a printable version, the trick is to copy-paste
the text into a Word document and then print. While doing so, paste the text in
an unformatted format (go to Edit>Save special>Unformatted text).
Turn off background when printing from IE. You don’t need to waste toner on
printing the backgrounds of HTML pages.
You can turn it off by going to Tools>Internet options. In the dialog box
that appears, click on the Advanced tab, scroll down to Printing and uncheck the
‘Print background colors and images’.
Photocopy prints. Do not use your printer as a copier. If you need to
take multiple prints of a document, then take one print and get photocopies
made. Copying costs much less than printing. An inkjet printout costs about a
rupee, while a photocopy costs about 60 paise (bulk rate).
Avoid color prints. Even if you have a color printer, you don’t have
to take color printouts when you don’t need them; take black and white or
monochrome. And, save up to 10 to 30 percent of your printing costs. You’ll
find this feature in the Properties box of any software.
Print at lower resolution. Save on toner or ink and time by printing
at a low resolution (documents printed at lower resolution take lesser time to
print). Users can do so by adjusting the resolution on their computer by going
to Properties from the Print window. A more efficient way would be to adjust it
on the printer itself. Also look for other toner saving features on your printer
driver.
Print on both sides of paper. Enable the double-side printing option
if you have a duplexer printer. With this, you save 30 to 40 percent on your
paper usage.
Update drivers. Manufacturers regularly update printer drivers to fix
bugs. You should visit your printer manufacturer’s site and download and
install any new updates that may have been posted.
Refill cartridges. Printer companies will not be happy with this
suggestion of ours as they get a large part of their revenue from selling
cartridges. But, take our word for it, refilling your used cartridges can give
you great savings–about 30 percent per cartridge. On an average, you can
refill a cartridge up to ten times.