Office 2013: The Missing Manual

Chapter 6. Printing Documents

Despite all the talk about becoming a paperless society, we’re still plenty fond of the dead-tree route. No matter how popular email and texting get, there still will be times when you want to print a hard copy to mail, pin to a bulletin board, or hand out at a meeting.

When it’s time to print out a document, Word 2013 takes you backstage, via the File tab, to prepare the document for printing. All the settings of the old, familiar Print dialog box from earlier versions of Word are still there, but they’re better organized and give you more options. Longtime Word users won’t miss the Print dialog box for a minute.

This chapter gives you a tour of the backstage Print page, shows how to send a fax and print envelopes and labels, and walks you through a mail merge (a snap, thanks to Word’s super-helpful wizard)—without breaking a sweat.

Getting Started with Printing

The quickest way to print something is to add the aptly named Quick Print button to the Quick Access toolbar. (Customizing Office Applications tells you how to add buttons to this toolbar.) When you’ve done that, clicking Quick Print sends the current document straight to the printer. If you frequently print stuff out, you’ll definitely want the Quick Print button at hand.

But Quick Print isn’t suitable for every printing job because it doesn’t let you adjust your print settings before dashing the document off to the printer. You might want to double-check a document’s formatting first or print ...