Reverse And Mirror Printing In Word

Here’s a couple of quick and nifty tweaks for Microsoft Word from Propellerhead. The first one is Reverse Printing, which is a way of setting Word to reverse the order in which documents are printed. By default it’s set to print in the order they appear on the screen, i.e. page one first. The trouble with that is when you print a long document you have re-collate the pages so that page one is on top of the pile. To switch on Reverse printing, so that the last page prints first, go to Tools > Options and select the Print tab and under Printing Options check ‘Reverse Print Order’.

The next tip is a way of printing text backwards, or ‘mirror’ printing. It’s not a standard document printing feature and you can only do a line or two at a time but it’s handy for creating eye-catching headlines and sub heads. Open the Drawing toolbar (View > Toolbars > Drawing) and click where you want the Mirror text to appear. Next click the WordArt icon (slanty capital letter ‘A’ on the Drawing toolbar), select the plain style in the top left hand corner and compose your text.

You can also set font type and size from this box. Click OK and it’ll appear at the insertion point. You can change to a solid colour from the Fill Colour icon on the Drawing toolbar, and change any other attributes you feel necessary. When you are happy with its position and size click the Draw drop-down menu on the Drawing toolbar, select Rotate or Flip, then Flip Horizontal and hey-presto, backwards writing.  For larger blocks of copy the only solution is to copy the page to a drawing program, mirror the image and paste it back into the document as a non-editable picture. Don’t forget there are loads more tweaks for Word in the archive at PCtoptips