Printing PowerPoint Slides

Many professors have posted their class presentations on Prometheus for students to view later. These presentations provide a valuable resource for students when studying for exams or preparing for the USMLE. Many students wish to print these presentations to file away for later use. Here are several printing suggestions to help keep costs down by conserving paper and printer toner:

Open the slides in Powerpoint on the computers in the microcomputer lab or the Women’s Board Teaching Center on the 3rd floor. These computers have the full version of Microsoft Powerpoint and provide several options when printing slides. The computers on the 1st floor of the Library are research stations and are available to all library patrons. They have only Powerpoint Viewer on them and are designed to view slides only. Since the 3rd floor computer labs are open only to students, staff and faculty, they have complete versions of Microsoft Office loaded on them.

Convert the slides to "pure black and white" when printing. Most presentations use dark backgrounds to help the audience visualize the presentation better. This is great for the presentation, but when printing this uses excessive amounts of toner ink. To change the slides to "pure black and white," after selecting the print option, check the "pure black and white" box on the print menu. This will convert the slides to black and white (usually converting the dark background to white and the lighter print to black).

Try to print multiple slides on a page. To do this, after selecting the "print" icon, select properties, and increase "pages per sheet" to six or eight. Please note that some presentations will not permit this feature.

Doing these three simple tasks will help conserve the Library’s resources and keep the cost of library operations down.