"How can I print this?", "Why won't it print?", "How do I get the content on to an A4?". These are questions that we as a software company get from our customers. Printing becomes a real nuisance. With flow charts, organisation charts and qualification matrices, which can have larger and fancier dimensions, printing can be an enormous challenge. Nevertheless, printing is considered so important, rightly so? Nowadays, digital platforms can perfectly be used as a storage place for files. In that case, no document needs to be additionally adapted to the A4 (equal to the US Letter). So is the print trend still in keeping with the times? Perhaps it is time to leave the limits of the A4 behind! 

Just between us, how practical is the 21.0 cm x 29.7 cm format really? Texts are made for A4, scalable and unproblematic. The A4 sheet can be filled from front to back and top to bottom. The font size is adjusted as desired and if the text reaches the edge of the page, a new row starts automatically. But that is obviously the only thing the A4 is really good for. Try enlarging graphics and pictures in this format, you will fastly reach the limit.

Especially in the field of quality management, documentation is one of the core tasks. Flow charts, organigrams and qualification matrices are used daily. But from your own experience, how well do these harmonise with the classic A4 format? Exactly, not at all! Flow charts, in particular, require greater scope for design. Process flows consist of numerous intermediate steps, often with several branches and end points. For a clear presentation of the contents, the A4 is only a limitation. Most of the time, the contents have to be reduced in size, so that legibility suffers. We often spend hours shortening diagrams and reducing process steps to fit on A4 and you better not even forget one process step, otherwise all the work in PowerPoint and Visio was for nothing. Productivity looks different! It is even more difficult with the rigid qualification matrices consisting of hundreds of rows and dozens of columns. How are they supposed to fit on the A4?!

We won't even go into the consumption of resources and the costs for our environment, as well as the findability and searchability of printed information at this point.