Save money on printing costs

Cutting costs is important these days. There are plenty of ways to do it with your computer. One of the easiest is to reduce the costs associated with printing. As you know, ink and paper aren’t cheap.

You could stop printing documents all together. This would be the most effective way to reduce costs. But that isn’t always an option. If you must print, you can at least reduce use of resources.

Print only what you want

Printing Web pages is problematic. Maybe you like referring to my tips while working on your computer. A hardcopy of the Web page could be helpful. You could refer to it even if you have to shut down the computer.

But printing Web pages wastes a lot of ink and paper. You end up printing ads and banners that you don’t need. A couple free programs can help. They let you select a portion of the page to print.

You print only what you want. It’s a very smart idea. For help with this, use HP Smart Web Printing. If you use Firefox as your Web browser, there is a special extension Aardvark you can use.

Think of other ways to share

If you’re printing things to share with others, consider this alternative. PDF files can be viewed on any computer. Any document will retain its formatting when converted to a PDF. It’s a great way to share and store files without printing.

There are several free PDF writers. These programs add themselves to your list of printers. Just hit print in any document. Instead of printing, the document will be saved as a PDF. Try doPDF or PDFCreator. CutePDF will work on 64-bit and 32-bit Windows Vista. Mac OS X users can use CUPS-PDF.