E-mail Printing Trick

OK, I get questions several times a week asking how to print out just a particular section of an e-mail. Stuff like a good joke or a fantastic computer tip found in, say, Computer Tips!

Selective Printing

This may not work with every system out there. This tip only works if both your printer driver and the current software application you're using supports this little trick. So, take this for what it's worth.

Here's how I do it:

1. First, select the area you would like to print.

2. Next, from the file menu, select Print...
3. When the printer dialog box comes up, look for an option for "Selection", in a "Print Range" frame. Again, not all printers / software support this.

4. Click OK.

If your printer supports this, you'll find the option is available for stuff other than just e-mail. I use it for Word documents and web pages too. Please note that I was NOT able to get this little trick to work with Netscape (4.x or 6). This may be due to my printer driver, but I'm guessing that it's more likely that Netscape doesn't support selective printing.

Oh, one more thing. If you can't print a selection, you can always copy and paste the stuff you want into a word processor and print it from there. Sure, it's not nearly as much fun, but it's better than printing out eight pages of junk just to get a small section of text.

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