Want to get my easy to follow Tech Tips in your email?
Sign up for my daily Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter!
Do you occasionally need to print a web page? Or perhaps you frequently print lots of them?
If so, you know how much expensive ink and paper gets wasted by printing website headers, sidebars, ads, irrelevant images and other items that really have no connection whatsoever with the content you actually want to print.
Well, there’s a fantastic free tool called PrintFriendly that will let you print only the items on the page that you really wish to print while omitting the rest.
It works great, it’s extremely easy to use, and it’s completely free. What could be better than that?
PrintFriendly lets you de-select unwanted images, text, and even entire sections of the page an make lots of other changes to the page to ensure that the printed copy is exactly the way you want it.
Printing with PrintFriendly is easy…
Simply visit the PrintFriendly website and enter the URL of the page you wish to print, then click the Preview button.
Now that you have a slimmed-down preview version of the web page on your screen you have several options:
1 – You can print the slimmed-down page as-is by clicking the little printer icon in the top-left corner of the preview window.
2 – Move your mouse pointer over a section of text or image that you would like to remove, then click on it. Everything that was previously highlighted will be removed from the preview. One you have removed everything you don’t want to print from the preview you can follow the steps above to print.
3 – Click the PDF icon to convert the page into a PDF file.
Pretty awesome, right?
Bottom line: Now you don’t have to print all the junk along with the actual content you want to print from the web pages you visit. Simply use PrintFriendly and leave all the unwanted clutter behind!
Note: PrintFriendly offers a free browser extension that lets you print slimmed-down versions of web pages without having to visit the PrintFriendly website, but I prefer not to use it since I prefer using as few browser extensions as possible. I just keep the PrintFriendly website bookmarked instead.