Printing: the “odd pages only” trick

Self-tutoring about office tasks: the tutor mentions an old standby.

In my experience, sometimes, when the user produces a document, it may seem like only one page, but is actually two, the second being blank. I find this can happen for a number of reasons.

When the user goes to print said document, they might just accept the defaults (using the mouse rather than the keyboard), one of which may be to print “All”. They end up with the page they wanted, then a second, blank page as well. It’s no big deal, but if you want ten copies of the single-paged document, and each one prints a second blank page, it gets hard to ignore.

To prevent that occurrence when I know all the content is on the first page, but somehow a blank second might be generated, I select “Print odd pages only.” That saves me having to shift to the keyboard from the mouse.