When it comes to using resources in the office, every cent counts. Here are a few more tips and tricks for saving money on your printing costs.
1 – Print with a slightly lower quality rating
Unless you’re printing reports for clients or other official documents, the quality of the printing doesn’t really need to be all that high. Most inkjet printers will give you the option to switch to Draft Mode when printing. This just means that the text and images might come out a little fuzzy or blurry, but that’s okay for printing internal documents for office use.
2 – Use a print tracking system like GreenPrint (www.printgreener.com/).
It’s a free bit of software that acts as a virtual printer that catches and tracks documents before they reach the physical printer. It gives you the option to remove any blank pages, save to PDF rather than print, and a few other cool features designed to save you money. It will also show you how many pages and how much money you’ve saved since installing the software.
3 – Don’t print your own photographs
Search online for a print shop that prints high quality versions of your photographs rather than doing it yourself. Printing these types of images is the biggest user of colour ink. If you do need to print a lot of photos every month, you could find it a lot cheaper to outsource those print jobs.
4 – Adjust your page margins
This is great way of making sure that you use less paper. With more text on each page you may find that you save one page for every 5 or 6 printed pages. This little saving will add up over time and amount to whole reams of paper over the years.
5 – Change your fonts
A simple but very effective way to cut down on the amount of ink you use for text documents is to find a font that uses less ink. For example, it’s been proven that Century Gothic uses far less ink than the industry standard Arial font, and the same goes for that tried and trusted Times New Roman font we’re all familiar with. Again, this is especially useful for printing internal documents that clients won’t ever need to see.