Office 2010: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5. 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 gets, there still will be times when you want to print a hard copy to mail, to pin to a bulletin board, or to hand out at a meeting.

Printing in Word 2010 is different from earlier versions of the program. You’re probably familiar with the classic Print dialog box, where you told Word what to print and how many copies. Word 2010 takes you Backstage, via the File tab, to prepare a document for printing. All the familiar settings are still there, but they’re better laid out and give you more options. You 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 introduces you to Word’s super-helpful wizard to do a complex mail merge—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 the Quick Access Toolbar 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’re a frequent printer, you’ll definitely want the Quick Print button at hand.

But Quick Print isn’t suitable for every printing job. You might want to double-check a document’s formatting first or print a certain page range or a lot of copies, for ...