Saving Money With Your Printer

I guess I could talk about printing coupons to save money with your printer, but that's not exactly what I had in mind. What I was thinking about were some of the things I've been doing to try and save money when printing other things.

1. Think. Do you really need to print it out? Is it something you can just read online or save as a document on your computer to retrieve {and read on your computer}later on?

2. Gray. Convert all your text from black to a gray and it will use less ink. Experiement with different shades of gray to see what works best for you. Some people may prefer to read a lighter gray while others with poorer eyesight would have a harder time reading a light shade.

3. Double-sided. If your printer has this capability, set your printer settings to print on both sides of your paper, or print half, then manually re-insert the paper to print the rest on the other side.

4. Increase the Pages Per Sheet. Some programs, like Microsoft Word, have a setting in the printer settings box that allows you to print multiple pages on one page. You can choose from 1-16 pages per sheet and it will shrink your text down and fit them onto the page.

For me personally, anything more than 4 sheets per page gets pretty tiny. But printing double-sided at the same time allows me to print 8 pages worth of material on only one sheet of paper! That saves me a lot of paper!

Sometimes if a program doesn't allow me this printing option then I will copy and paste the information into my program that does and then print from there.

How about you? Do you have other tips? If so, I'd love to hear them!