My post-holiday wrapping and unwrapping haze has me trying to conserve paper. As a transplanted California native, my eco-friendliness runs deep, which brings with it a heavy dose of self-inflicted guilt about wasting paper.

Hence this week’s two-minute tech tip: Use print preview to save paper and make sure you’re printing what you want. You won’t have to reprint just because the formatting is off (like that extra column in Excel), and you can avoid printing pages with one or two lines of unnecessary text (like ads at the bottom of a web page or a long signature in an email).

Before you even get to printing, I want you to think about whether you really need to print. Can you save it as a PDF instead? (A tech tip for another day!) If I haven’t sold you on saving the planet, think of the money you’ll save on ink and paper, not to mention adding to that mess on your desk.Acknowledging that some things do need to be printed, it’s very simple to preview before you print.

PC: In Excel and many other applications, choose “File” from the application menu, then select “Print Preview” instead of “Print.” Click through the pages. If you like what you see, you can select “Print” while you’re still in the preview. To go back to editing, you can close the preview window with either the red x at the top right, or by clicking “close” in the top menu, the location of which may vary depending on what program you’re in, but is usually a button at the top of the page.

Mac: Go straight to “Print.” In the box that pops up with your print options, it shows you a little picture of the pages to be printed. You can click through the pages with the left and right arrows below the image. If you don’t see the preview, and you only see a little box with two pull-down menus, click the button with the arrow next to the printer selection to see the full options. If you still don’t see it, make sure you have “Copies and Pages” selected. Then, if you want to look at it more closely, click the “Preview” button at the bottom of the window. This will open in a separate program called Preview, which is actually converting it to PDF (this would also be a good opportunity to hit “save” instead of “print.”)

As mentioned above, this is particularly useful when printing from Excel or when printing web pages. With Excel, you can check whether or not your last column is going to fall on an extra page, which makes it hard to compare your data and doubles your page count. If it does, exit out of print preview, then set your print area, change the column width, or change to landscape. (Printing in Excel: yet another tech tip?)

With most browsers you can avoid printing an extra page containing ads or comments, or whatever is trailing below the substance of the page you’re printing, by using print preview (though, unless I’m missing something, Google’s Chrome does not include a ‘print preview’ option). If you go to print preview and see the last page is unnecessary, go ahead and tell it to print, but under “Page range,” select the radio button by “Pages:” instead of “All.” (Or, on a mac, select “From” instead of “All.”) Then, put in the page range. For example, if you have a four page document and only want the first three pages, enter “1-3” as the page range. Alternately, highlight just the portion you want to print, then select “Selection” under Page range (this last option is not available on macs; how ridiculous!).

Try this with email too. Even very short emails can print as two pages once you take into account the long signature block or confidentiality warnings. Usually, if I’m printing an email, it is for instructions or directions, in which case I don’t even need the person’s contact information, or I’m saving the email otherwise. If you look at print preview and notice it will print on two pages just because of a disclaimer, limit it to print just the first page, or even “current page view.” If you’re an attorney, the disclaimer probably doesn’t apply to you anyway

Think twice before you print, and print only what you need!