What are your best tips on how to cut down on printing at home, ladies? One of the main things I miss from working in a big office is the printer and the joy of going through stacks of papers to make edits and changes, take notes, and more. I could do that still, of course, but especially in 2020 as we all try to do better environmentally, it seems wasteful and unnecessary. Indeed, I've become downright stingy in what I actually print. So let's talk about some of the ways to cut down printing at home...
This post contains affiliate links and Corporette® may earn commissions for purchases made through links in this post. For more details see here. Thank you so much for your support!This is handy in two main instances: 1) PowerPoint presentations with lots of white space (or abstract designs) and not a ton of words, and 2) instances when you need to print 8 pages of something for the sake of completeness, but truly only need something on page 1. This was the case with a ton of my year-end financial statements so when I sent them to my accountant, he got 2 pages on one page. (Sorry, Bradley!) You can do this from pretty much any program before you send it to your printer, but I often find it easiest to first print the full document to PDF, and then print the PDF with 2 pages per doc; playing around with landscape or portfolio mode may also help make it more readable. More than 2 pages per page is doable but... well... inadvisable. If you really want to go that route (or you suffer from eye strain in general), you may want to get a magnifying sheet like these to look over smaller text. (I have one that is like a hard sheet of plastic the same size as paper.)
If you have to read lengthy, wordy documents, reading them on a computer monitor can be hard on your eyes. But if you have a friendlier device like the Kindle ( this one is my favorite), you can email yourself PDFs, Word documents, and more, and read them on the Kindle using the special Kindle email address that every Kindle owner gets. Pagination might change from the original document, though, so if you're working with other people you may want to make sure you have a system in place, such as line numbers.
Sometimes there's nothing quite so good as a close line edit or otherwise marking up the document itself with arrows and circles and other scribbles - in that case, the iPhone/iPad app Good Notes is one of my favorite solutions to this problem. It currently costs $7.99 at the app store, and you can send almost any kind of document to the app, which then lets you write directly on top of it, adjusting brushstroke, color, and more. An Apple pencil does help - and for lengthy handwriting you can also get a paper-like screen protector for your iPad - but you can also just use your finger and the regular screen.