MOS Talk: Fitting it all on one page
Submitted by Brett Fisher on Sun, 05/20/2018 - 12:09pm
Growing up in Oregon's Willamette Valley, I had become accustomed to the occasional paper plant along the Interstate 5 corridor between Eugene and Portland.
The long, straight, boring car ride did become interesting at times. I would always perk up when I knew we were approaching the exit to Albany, because a massive paper plant was situated, quite literally, right along the freeway.
Once I spied it, I'd count down from 10 or 20 and get ready. Just when the tingle of an odor hit my nose, I held my breath until we had safely passed the spires billowing out their stinking steam and smoke.
That odorous plant left a lasting impression me, because to this day, I am somewhat obsessive-compulsive about conserving paper. Not that I have any real power to save a 4.5 billion year-old planet, but the more paper I can conserve, the less that's required to churn out of smelly, old paper plants.
As an office professional, I'm often looking for ways to save paper. Costs of packaged paper can add up quickly, after all, and I'm on a tight expense budget.
Microsoft Office offers some tools to avoid using excess paper when printing documents.
From the colored file tab in the upper left hand corner of MS Word or Excel programs, scroll down to the print function. You can select a number of options that meet your printing needs and fit contents on as few sheets of paper as possible.
There is the two-sided print function, selected from a drop-down when clicking on the one-sided default. That way, document contents will print on just half the sheets required of one-sided print jobs.
Sometimes simply changing page orientation can fit all of your data on one page. This works particulary well for MS Excel spreadsheets.
Another trick is to adjust your document's margins. The industry default is about one-inch on all sides of a print area. Consider narrowing these margins. This increases the print area of a document, so more contents will fit on a page.
If you are printing rough drafts for review, consider thumbnails instead of full size drafts. At the bottom of MS Word's print menu, you will see a default that says "one page per sheet." Click this and select up to 16 pages per sheet of standard business 8.5 by 11 paper.
Admittedly, that might be hard to read. But perhaps fitting 2-4 pages on one sheet will still allow its contents to be reviewed while saving paper.
Finally, the scaling function in the print menu of MS Excel is an effective way to fit tables of data on one standard sheet of paper that are normally too wide, too deep or both.
Scaling means to decrease or increase size by percentage. The Microsoft default is 100 percent, so if you have one column or row too many to fit on a standard sheet of paper, try reducing the scale just a little to squeeze that last bit of data into the print area.
Whether you endeavor to save the environment or the olfactory sense of others traveling near a paper plant, I encourage you to find ways that use less paper in your work. Wise paper management reduces waste and is more cost-effective to business.
Brett Fisher is a certified Microsoft Office Specialist instructor and news writer residing in Carson City.
