This “Tip of theWeek” brought to you by S2M Computer Consulting

We all want to be as “green” as we can these days… It’s just the right thing to do and why not save some money while you do your part for the environment!

I find myself constantly printing things off like invoices, maps, addresses, and confirmation emails, maybe many of you also find yourself printing stuff like this too?

Do you also find that much of the time you think you’re only going to get one page but when all is said and done, out pops another couple pages of non-relevant info or even sometimes one line of print that renders that entire page useless for reuse.

Here’s what I do to get around this problem and save on paper and ink as well as overall printer usage and general waiting around.

The first thing you can do in your Macs Mail program is to open your “Mail Preferences” and select the “Viewing Tab” along the top, in the drop down box beside where it says “Show header detail:”, select “None”. This will show and print your emails without the header at the top which in many cases when printing may not be required. By simply removing the header you may squeak your email onto one page.

Check-out these two examples:

Sometimes even by removing the header in an email you still get way to many pages and the question comes to mind: “Do I really need my printed copy to be so big?” I say no! Most of the time the text and images are too big anyways or in the case of a receipt, I just need a hard copy for my records so as long as it’s readable then I’m OK.

So how do we change the size of what we print? It’s really easy, I’m going to use the same email example but with the header so that it just doesn’t quit fit on one page and then I’m going to select my “File – Print” Menu in Mail or press “Command – P”. At this point I will see either a simplified Drop down Printer window or the enhanced drop down Printer window. We need to be in the enhanced mode. To do this make sure the triangle to the right of your Printer option is pointing up, if it is pointing down then click on it to make it point up and you will now see the enhanced Printer options.

Here is an example of both views:

In the above example at 100% we will get two pages if we were to print this document, I can tell this because under the preview it says “1 of 2″. We want to change the Scale percentage to a smaller number until the preview says “1 of 1″. In this case if I enter 90% to get my document to fit onto one page.

Like this:

You will need to use common sense here, some documents can easily fit from 3 pages into 2 pages or 4 into 3, don’t get too crazy or you’ll need to reprint the document again because it was too small the first time to even read.

If you can save a couple of pages a day along with the ink and printer overhead, that can really cut down on waste and cost and save a tree or two while putting less printer cartridge plastic in our landfills.

(Posted by Mike)