Tuesday, February 17, 2015

If you must print....

As I hope I made clear in my previous post, I'm all about moving to paperless as much as possible.  Keeping your documents paperless saves paper, toner, and printer maintenance.  But more than that, it keeps documents more available via cloud storage (e.g. Google Drive), it makes the documents easier to distribute, it reduces storage costs, makes it easier to find documents and to search documents.

But I know that despite all these reasons, you still want to print.  You are used to it and you don't quite trust or feel comfortable working with documents in electronic format.  This post is for those of you who still feel the need to print out large numbers of documents onto old fashioned paper.  Let's at least try to do this in the most efficient and cost effective way possible.

Almost everyone in the firm has a personal printer/scanner on his or her desk.  This is to make things much more convenient to print out short letters or documents without having to leave your desk.  But the desktop printers are not really designed to print out thousands of pages each month.  Compared to the copiers, per copy prints are more expensive because of the toner.  The printers are also much slower, meaning you have to wait much longer to get your documents.  If you must print larger documents, I strongly recommend using the copiers.  All office copiers can be set up as network printers.  Your print jobs will print out 3-5x faster, and be 2-4x cheaper per page to print.

You should have a copier set up on your computer as an alternative printer.  Simply select that printer and send your print job there.  Just don't forget to go pick it up.  Additionally, Philadelphia and Mt. Laurel users have the option of simply sending your electronic documents to Reliable for printing.  Using the network copiers for large jobs saves both time and money.

If you do not have a network copier set up on your computer, someone from the help desk should be able to help you get it set up without much fuss.

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