Double Sided Printing

I was recently asked a question about printing on double sided.  Printing on both sides of a papers saves both money and storage space.

By default, you might want to leave printer settings on one sided, only because court filings or letters probably need to be sent one sided, and you don't want to have to reprint things that went to two sides by mistake.  When printing from Google, you should see a check box for two sided printing.  For other apps, there is usually a printer options window that comes up before printing.  You can select two sided there if your printer supports it.

Most of the HP printers in use at your desk are capable of printing on two sides, although some of our older models do not.  If the name of the printer has a D in it, D is for duplex and you should have an option to print to two sides.  Similarly, almost all copiers firm-wide can print on both sides.  You can also request that reliable print out on two sides if you want them to do that.

If you have any questions about how to print on two sides, feel free to call the help desk.

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.