Office 2007 Bible

Printing a File

With the crisp, vibrant output produced by today’s cheap color printers, who would want a paperless office? Although the Internet and faster computer networks have made electronic transmission a common and accepted means of sharing documents, many circumstances still call for—if not require—that information be shared on paper:

• Legal documents such as contracts that need to be signed, initialed, dated, or otherwise stamped are still largely handled on paper. Standards for digital signatures are still evolving, and most users still print a hard copy of a contract or agreement for official filing.

• When a reader or viewer won’t have a computer or connection at hand and will need to take notes, you need to provide a hard copy. For example, participants in seminars typically don’t bring along a notebook and prefer to take their notes on a hard copy of a presentation.

• When you want to make a strong impression, hard copy is still preferred. Although e-mail is increasingly accepted as a standard business practice for many communications, sometimes it doesn’t measure up. For example, it might be acceptable to e-mail a proposal to a potential new client, but hand-delivering a hard copy and then following up by e-mail shows that you still care enough to make a personal effort to get the business.

• When you need a fresh perspective on a document, you can get it by working from hard copy. Reading through a printed copy of a document can help you catch text and formatting mistakes ...