Printing Tips

There are questions that come up in the reference area pretty frequently and the most common computer/printer related questions deal with printing two different types of documents that have been downloaded.

The first question is How do I print out Power Point slides in the handout style? In order to do this, you need to open up the print options of the PPT document you are viewing. Go to File>Print. Once the options are open, look down on the left hand side and find where it says: Print What. Change it from "slides" to "handouts" and when you do, you will see the option to modify the handout from 6 to 3 which will then change to 3 slides per page, including an area for notes.

The second most common printer question people have is why won't the .pdf document print? It usually means the document has been created by scanning a document and saving it as an image file rather than a document. This increases the file size tremendously. I've seen some pdf articles with a file size of 530mb (large compared to what we used to use in the old days a "floppy disk" that was 3.5 mb. ) Even today's flash drives are typically only 128-528 mb so imagine what this is doing to the computer memory (especially on older computers.)

So, another simple trick is to open the print options by clicking on the printer icon in the pdf document. When the options box opens look down at the bottom. Click on the Advanced button and when the Advanced box opens up check the "print as image" box and click OK. This will help the pdf document print a little faster. You will usually find the large pdf documents in eReserve and as articles from some of the databases.