I’ve heard about it quite a bit lately, greater Phoenix real estate agents are wasting paper printing practically blank pages from flexmls. Nothing erks me more than chopping down innocent trees to fuel our wasteful printing – what did the trees do to deserve this!?!? [regaining composure] The two print jobs I’ve received the most feedback about are the Listing Input Forms and the Listing Detail Report. I’m on a flexmls feature friday mission: To Teach You How To Use Your Internet Browser Print Options. (For some crazy reason I’ve accepted this mission.)
Here’s the hitch in my get along – you and I use different internet browsers and different printers which has the potential of creating different results. But if your take away from this article is learning how to adjust your settings, you will be empowered to curb wasteful printing. Since I use both Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3ish, I can at least share the settings in both of those that work for me.
Are you a firefox user? Check out this tutorial (with pictures!) on how to access and change your settings right from the print preview screen. The reason I like working from the print preview screen is because as soon as you make the changes and click OK you can see the results. This is important because the forms you are trying to print are dynamic – meaning the length of them depends on the information in the listing. Is there one setting that will work every time? Probably not, but here’s what I find works for most.
- Listing Detail Report & Listing Input Forms
- Scale = 90%
- Top, Bottom, Right, and Left Margins = .1
- Header & Footers = –blank–
Are you an Internet Explorer user? Check out this tutorial (sans pictures) on how to access and change your page settings. Again, I like accessing Page Setup from the Print Preview screen because you can see your changes immediately. As mentioned above, the forms’ length will vary depending on the information entered, but I find these settings to work most of the time.
- Property Details Page & Listing Input Forms
- Top, Bottom, Right, and Left Margins = .25
- Header and Footer = -Empty-
Researching this post has enlightened me. It’s rare that I prefer the work of Internet Explorer, but it happened today. When I printed the Listing Input Forms using Internet Explorer – they were much easier to read. The check boxes in the dual column boxes didn’t overlap like they do when using Firefox. IE8 win.
I wish you good luck with becoming familiar with your Page Setup options. It’s a handy one to know since we’re printing from the web more and more.
Happy Flexmls Feature Friday!
