Let’s say you’ve got a ginormous image that you’d like to print. Maybe it’s a picture of a map, and the resolution of the image is something like 2000 by 2200 pixels.

Obviously, you could just print the image to a single sheet of A4/Letter paper, but you’d lose a lot of detail.

If you’re a serious Photoshopper, you’d probably just fire up that particular app and use the built-in functionality to split and print.

For the rest of us, however, that’s not exactly what we’d call “easy”.

The good news is that Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 all give you a wonderful (AHEM!) application that does exactly what you need…

You’re going to find this hard to believe, but that built-in Windows app that will split-print an image for you is none other than Microsoft’s much-maligned Paint application!!

I know – whodduh thunkit?

Although I have to say that Paint in Windows 7 is definitely better than the previous version, at least in terms of looks…

In any case, here’s what you do:

Open the image you’d like to print in Paint Select: Print -> Page Setup (Vista and 7), or File -> Page Setup (in XP) Under Scaling, select Fit to and change the setting to something like “2 by 2 page(s)” Click OK Print the image from Paint, and make sure to select “All Pages”

That’s it – you’re done. You can take any image and have Paint print it out on multiple sheets of paper. If you’d like, you can also adjust the page margins in the Page Setup. In any case, all that’s left is to trim the white border from the individual printed pages, break out the scotch tape, and go to town.

Before you know it, you’ll have your huge image printed and assembled on regular-sized paper.

What’s really strange about this little feature is that I know a lot of people who would love to know about it. But 10 out of 10 people I asked had no idea that Paint could do this. Most people I talk to also have no idea that even in Windows XP, you can select a bunch of images, right click, and choose Send to -> Mail Recipient. That will present a little box that lets you automatically resize the images to a smaller resolution before opening your default e-mail client and attaching the resized images to a new message. And yet every Mac user knows their system can do that…

But then, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. When has Microsoft ever successfully advertised the truly useful features in their operating systems?

Need a new color printer?