Troubleshooting for Finals Week

Ah, finals week.  The perfect time for "oh my god, why isn't my paper formatting right?"

So in that spirit, I wanted to share two of the problems I've helped panicked students with repeatedly in the past few days.

Problem 1:
You've got this weird, possibly slightly differently colored dead space on the right side of your document that you can't get rid of and is messing up your print outs.  This area is supposed to be where your document "comments" go, and when there are no comments it is supposed to vanish, but sometimes it doesn't seem to want to do that.

To remove that area, go to the Review tab, and then look for the "Tracking" section of your menu ribbon.  It will have the option to Track Changes, Show Mark Up, Reviewing Pane, and a drop down menu.  You'll want to change the menu from "Original: Show Markup" or "Final: Show Markup" to simply the "Original" or "Final" option, and that should suppress the comments area.


Problem 2:
The printer is only printing out every other page of your document (in particular this is for public printers such as in a computer lab or the library).

This one I can't really do screen caps for, because depending on a few things your interface may be different.  Here's the important part.  When you go into the print menu in whatever program you're using (Word, Acrobat, whatever), open up the printer properties, it should be a text hyperlink right near where the printer selection is shown.  Once that is open look for Effects or just hit through all the tabs until you find one that has an option for double sided printing.  Uncheck/turn off/whatever the double-sided printing option.  Chances are the double sided printing for the machine requires manually reloading the pages that have all the odd numbered pages so that it can print the even numbered pages on the backs of those pages.

As a caveat, sometimes public printers do fully support double sided printing, and you do indeed want to use double sided printing.  In that case make sure that the printer properties are not expecting you to manually flip and reload the pages .



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