The first thing that you should ask yourself is: Should I just take the digital route and avoid printing on paper altogether? In this digital age, PDFs are extremely common across a wide range of projects and businesses.
Creating a PDF offers multiple advantages. For instance, your document won’t lose its original presentation, and you can easily save it on Google Drive or any other document-sharing platform.
Working around your font selection can help you reduce costs. Consider reducing the font size or choosing a font that uses less ink. Use formatting to your advantage. Don’t forget that you are not limited by font style or size.
By reducing the margins, you can add a lot more room for the word count. While it may look a bit odd at first, over time you’ll more likely notice a little difference in how you read documents and things of the like.
Edit what you print. A lot of people get into the habit of printing as much as possible so that they don’t leave any information out. The reality is that, most of the time, we don’t need everything. Take out all the things that you are pretty sure you won’t need. This includes pictures, graphs, and whatever else will take up your ink.
One very common mistake is to print out whole webpages. This often means that you end up printing a bunch of stuff that you don’t need. For this reason, many people turn pages into text first and then print. Before printing, ask yourself what it is that you need and what may just serve as decoration.
This is a common practice, particularly in an office environment where employees are encouraged to complete a project and may be tempted to print a document version even if it's not the final one.
This one may be obvious, but a lot of people don’t count it out. Print in black and white whenever possible. If there’s no need to see the different colors, and the text in terms of the information that it provides is what’s important, just turn everything into black and white. Color inks are much more expensive than plain black.
To discourage employees from printing graphs, charts, and photographs in color, inform them of the cost of a draft document and establish clear guidelines for color printing.
Scanning has changed the game for a lot of people. You can use your phone to scan a document and, in this manner, send it through email, WhatsApp, or whatever program you regularly use. Thus, you can multiply the uses by the number of recipients that can access your document.
Many people waste excessive amounts when it comes to printing, but with effort, we can significantly reduce it. Outsourcing your printing tasks is a great option to not only cut down on printing costs but also streamline a messy and demanding process.