I’m going paperless: reducing my printing

As the first (and probably easiest) step in my resolution to go paperless, I’ve worked out a way to reduce the amount of times I need to print something out at home.

I’d already mentioned that I hardly print anything out at work. Mostly this is because I’m a web developer, so the bulk of my work is online anyway. But I do sometimes need to test what a website looks like printed out, or keep a document for later use. Quite often, what I do at work is print to a PDF document instead of using paper.

What this does is create a new PDF document from the page – 95% of the time, it looks identical to what you’d print on paper. I’ll admit to having wasted a bit of paper confirming this to start with, but now I rely on it for almost all my work ‘printing’ needs. A PDF document can’t be edited or changed, but it’s great for storing information you’ll want to read later.

So what I needed was a similar ability at home. I don’t own the fancy version of Adobe Acrobat that lets you print to pdf, so I hunted through the alternative software that does the same trick.

I decided on CutePDF, because it’s free (always a great price) and because it does exactly what I need and no more. It adds “CutePDF” to the printer list on my laptop. When I choose that instead of my home inkjet, it turns the webpage or email or Word document that I want to print into a PDF that I can name and save on my computer for later.

Mostly I’ll be using this to print email, receipts from online shopping, or any Word or Excel documents that people send me and I want to keep. I’ve set up an Archive folder on my computer and all my ‘printed’ stuff will go in there, in case I need to print it on paper later on for some reason. Since I can read PDFs on my iPhone, it’ll come in handy for any longer documents I want to read on the go, like the greenwash report from Greenpeace that I’m currently into.

I don’t think this will be a huge reduction to the paper in my life, but it only took 5 minutes to set up, and I think it’ll be one of those handy little things that I use often. If you want to try it out, CutePDF is great, but there are stacks of alternatives out there that all do a good job.