Make Painless Printing Your Printing Default

Speeding Up Print Jobs And Clearing Out Paper Jams

Most of our blog posts have been about big-picture print management solutions — the creation of a comprehensive managed print strategy to cut hardcopy costs, printing inefficiencies and your company’s carbon footprint.

This cumulative approach to your company’s document workflow is, without a doubt, very important. But what about your daily printing struggles? What about the everyday glitches, backups and hiccups plaguing your print jobs and frustrating your employees?

Here are two common printing problems and some preventative measures and quick-fix solutions to take care of them on the spot:

1.    “Our printing takes forever. It’s so slow that I’ll press print, run to the bathroom, stop by my friend’s desk for a bit and come back to the printer with it still not finished!”

Your problem may be resolution-related. Higher resolution gives you clearer and more vibrant images and text, but it significantly slows down your printing and uses up your toner and ink supplies. Set your print mode to Standard or Draft in your printer driver. This way, only the most important print jobs get the manual switch to high resolution.

Also, keep in mind that images take longer to print than text. Educate your employees to take out unnecessary pictures and graphics to speed up the print job and save on ink and paper. If you don’t want to cut down on your picture printing, consider adding RAM — most base models of multifunction devices have minimal memory.

Printing pages two-up — two half-sized pages printed on each piece of paper — will also cut down on print processing, as well as ink and paper usage, by cutting page count in half.

2.   “Paper jams happen on a maddening, regular basis. I’ve just about lost faith in our multifunction devices altogether.”

Yes, paper jams are irritating and time-consuming to say the least.

• Make sure your printer supports the type of paper you’re using.
• Static electricity may be causing sheets of paper to cling together. This is especially true in dryer climates. To prevent this problem, fan the paper before loading it into the tray.
• Humidity is another big paper jammer. Replace paper that’s moist from humidity with dry sheets and store your paper in a dry environment. Paper that has absorbed moisture becomes particularly difficult to print.
• When paper is packaged, it’s cut using a very large knife or guillotine. Sometimes the papers’ edges curve over each other, causing multiple sheets to be picked from the printer. This problem is called a mis-pick. Fanning the paper before loading it into the tray also prevents this problem.
• Inspect the printer and remove any foreign material that may be obstructing the paper path.
• When removing jammed paper, always pull the sheet(s) out straight and avoid tearing the paper. It’s much harder to remove all the pieces of torn, jammed paper. If the paper is stuck tightly, figure out how to release the pressure instead of pulling with force.
• Make sure the stack of paper in the printer’s tray is straightened and all edges are aligned. When refilling the paper, make sure you keep sheets lined up with the tray’s paper guides.

The worst thing you can do is become accustomed to slow printing and print processing inefficiencies. Your employees should never be surprised when a print job is processed quickly and successfully the first time around.

For more advice on managing your everyday printer service and putting easy printing on default for your team, contact DocuSense today!