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Computer Basics
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Click on the  Print button on the toolbar or use the File | Print command from the menu. But wait! You may have an unhappy surprise if you don't think about a few things first.
Design for your printer
We looked earlier at
Printer Features and Printer Types.
In those lessons we saw that not all features are available on all printers. So
the first thing you must know is what kind of printer you have and which
features it has. If you want to print a colorful picture that you drew, but
your printer won't do color, you will be disappointed in the printout!
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Print Preview Most programs these days are have a WYSIWYG view or offer a Print Preview command on the File menu or a
 button on the toolbar.
 Preview EVERY time before you print! You will waste a lot of paper if you fail to look at what the printer thinks it is supposed to do. Especially check for the number of pages. If your table or picture is too wide, the excess will print on a separate page. You may want to reformat the document.
  Special note about spreadsheets:
It is VERY easy to accidentally format ALL of the several thousand cells available in a single spreadsheet, for example by putting a border around ALL instead of just the cells you actually have data in. This creates a document of dozens or hundreds of paper pages. If you print this whole document (which is usually the default for the Print button on the toolbar), it will take a very long time, waste a lot of paper, and really irritate everyone else who needs to use the printer! Check the number of pages in the document and be SURE it is right before you start a print job. Print Dialog BoxThe Print dialog box below, from Lotus WordPro 96, gives a number of options and shows the total number of pages in the section Print Range. The Print dialog will vary with different programs. Notice that there is a drop-list for printers. On a network you might have a choice of printers to use. In MS Word the Print dialog does not include the number of pages in the document. You must look on the status bar in MS Word to see how many pages there are. The 1/9 circled below means you are looking at page 1 of a 9 page document. These variations between different programs can get quite confusing!  Page SettingsYour program should have a toolbar button and/or a menu command called Page Setup that lets you set the Page Settings.These include:
In the example below, from Win95's Notepad, notice the various choices. This dialog box includes a textbox for you to enter the text for the header and footer.   The & is used with certain letters as a code for things that are commonly wanted in the header or footer.
The page on the right shows how the header and footer set above would look. Since there was no code for alignment entered for the footer, it was centered by default.
Here is a reference chart for commonly used codes:
No Print Area: Your printer has an area where it can't print for physical reasons. This no-print area varies from printer to printer. Commonly, printers can print within .25" of the left and right edges and .50" of the top and bottom of the paper. But this is not universally true. My old HP500C could print from .33" of the top but only from .67" of the bottom of the page. Your Print Preview or WSYIWYG view of your document might not take the no-print area into account. Thus, part of the document might not print even though you see it onscreen. Test your software to see how it handles margins that overlap the no-print area. And don't forget to LOOK for the header and footer! It's easy to miss that they are missing. If your header or footer doesn't print or is only partially there, you have either run into the no-print area, or you have set the header/footer margin too close to the size of the page margin, leaving no room for the header/footer itself!
~~ 1 Cor. 10:31 ...whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. ~~ | ||||||||||||||||||||||
