What type of printing personality are YOU?

The Office printer – there it sits in all it's glory for the use of each and every member of staff. But which one of these printing personalities are you?

 

The Master printer has piles of important looking documents, sometimes printed in triplicate, spread around his or her desk. They know that the more piles of paper they shuffle in a day, the more work they look like they're doing and the more important they seem. A true Master of Printing colour codes his paper too!

 

The Prolific printer doesn't believe in software back ups and is paranoid about losing information, so every email / article / spreadsheet / memo is printed out and kept. But don't think that because a Prolific Printer prints everything out, they can find things at the drop of a hat. The reams of pointless printing they've done means that finding anything worthwhile is like looking for a needle in a haystack!

 

The Scatty Printer is probably the same person spilling the tray of coffee on the office carpet, elbowing the boss in the stomach by accident and dropping the kettle in the middle of an important meeting. Rather than checking the documents they print, they just press 'control-p' willy nilly, then stare uncomprehendingly at a printer spewing out a 500 page document on full photographic quality and double embossed paper costing £50 a ream.

 

The retro printer lives in the past – sometimes even down to his or her dress sense! He hates reading on the screen so will print everything off 'so that he understands it' – he'll make notes on everything in red pen and couldn't possibly reply to an email without printing, reading, annotating and then getting ready to type. His waste paper bin is full of screwed up emails that say "Shall we meet at 10 or 11?" and "What do you want for dinner tonight darling?"

 

The Secret printer knows that printing everything out is bad for finances and for the environment, but they just don't feel complete without their printouts. They'll sneak to the printer while everyone is out, or stay late to print and amend documents, rather than be caught out wasting office and precious resources.

 

The Stingy Printer is usually the person in charge of paying for things. He'll buy the thinnest of paper, often job lots of kids colouring paper going cheap on the market, and set the printer to print in the lightest possible mode, no matter whether the document is a shopping list for the office or a 15 page tender for a £500k job. He won't replace the (refillable) cartridges in the printer until it is absolutely necessary so often documents will come out with one colour missing entirely.

 

The Perfect Printer knows down to the last penny how much it costs in ink, electricity and paper to print out an email, and the cost to the environment too. Every email she sends out has a stark "STOP! DO YOU REALLY NEED TO PRINT THIS EMAIL?" (that everyone else in the office ignores) and she knows how to work the printer to get double sided copies with the lightest print on the cheapest recycled paper better than the manufacturers. She'll tut noisily when others print out 'unnecessary' documents and ensure that everyone recycles their paper; firstly into scribble paper, then shredded for the office hamster, until being taken home for the compost heap.

 

Whichever type of printer you are, we all know that we need to print less in order to save time, save money and be a little more green.

 

At Harley Grove, we recommend offices that spend a lot on printing to take a look at Spindle Professional. Spindle Professional allows you to easily merge information from business applications to produce documents that can be sent by email, fax, printed and archived (including directly into INVU Digital Document Management software and Microsoft Sharepoint). Piles of archived documents in big filing cabinets can be reduced to bytes and pixels and stored on disk. Fax directly from your PC so no need for printing. Merge info from two or more documents into one to avoid pointless printing. Make huge savings on your printing costs.

 

Spindle Professional is versatile and equally suitable for use across a range of business applications. Sales & Marketing, Human Resources, Customer Services and Accounting functions can all benefit from a more streamlined and automated approach.

 

If you would like a web demo of Spindle Professional please click here.

 

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