The paperless office is another one of those future promises that has yet to be delivered, just like the flying car.
Enter GreenPrint. It’s not the paperless office, but it’s a step closer and a step in the right direction towards protecting our environment from the over-abundance of paper use and far too convenient ‘Print’ button. It also saves toner, protecting your wallet at the same time.
Essentially GreenPrint installs three printers to your machine. The main one, labeled GreenPrint sends your document, webpage, whatever print job to another program that acts like a print preview. You then look over this job and decide what you might want to discard and what you’d like to keep. Are images unnecessary on one page? Right-click on that page and select ‘Remove Images.’ Do you need the images, but not the text? Right-click on the page and select ‘Remove text.’ Is the last page just the footer of the website that you don’t need? Right-click and tell it to ‘Remove page.’
If you want to remove all images from all pages, just press Ctrl+6 and it will take out all images. If you make a mistake and want the images after all, just right-click on the page and select ‘Include images.’
After making your review (GreenPrint also has some basics where it can analyze the document for you and automatically remove a page if it meets your criteria: less than 5 lines of text or many other customizable specifics), simply click the ‘Print’ button and your document comes out streamlined saving paper and toner.
Another good way to move towards the paperless office is to store documents in a virtual form if you don’t need a hard copy of them. PDF seems to be the format of choice and you can use GreenPrint to print directly to PDFs. To save as a PDF from the Preview (by default pops up when printing to the GreenPrint printer) simply click the PDF button in the top left corner or you can print directly to the GreenPrint PDF printer which will simply prompt for a save location, and then create your PDF seamlessly. This might save you a license for Adobe Acrobat as well if you’re only making simple PDF documents.