When you need to print a file you can save some time by printing it directly from windows 8 file explorer. In other words you don’t need to launch a program to open up the file and print it from there. A Word document doesn’t need Microsoft Word to be printed and if you are printing a photo you don’t need to open up one of the photo apps to print it from there. You can do it from file explorer very easily. Open the folder which contains the files to be printed. Left click on your desired file and select “Share” from the ribbon. Here you will find print button. Another option is to right click on the file itself and choose “print” from the pop-up menu. Either way you are going to see the same thing which is the print picture dialogue box with a number of print option at your disposal as well as you can see a preview of what you are going to get. Now if you have some printers connected to your PC, just click the printer drop-down and select your desired printer. Also notice some options at the dialogue box. You can select the number of copies, auto fit to the selected paper size, print quality (DPI) etc. The quality of my printer and particular image for me is set to 600x600 DPI. Depending on the printer you have selected you may see other options here. The paper type can also be selected. You can put photo-paper into your printer to get a better result while printing a photo.
Over to the right hand side we also have some configurations. By default you are looking at a four page layout, but if you actually want smaller copies you can scroll down the list and find other options. For example there is one with 3.5’x5’ that will allow four copies on a letter size paper. All you need to do is to bump up the number of copies to 4 instead of 1. Just wait a second to preview what that’s going to look like. When you’re ready to print click the print button and off it goes.
This works for text files, documents, images and other famous file formats. Of course we can open these up in their native programs by just double clicking them and printing from there. But why not save yourself a few clicks by printing directly from file explorer.