How to print when you're on the road

Intro, solutions 1 and 2

Mobile technologies – like smartphones, laptops and tablets – are enabling road warriors to stay productive when away from their desks. The downside is that sometimes when you're working remotely, you'll encounter an email or document that needs to be printed, but you're nowhere near a printer.

Likely, you'll flag it or make a mental note to convert these digital files to analog paper when you return to your office, but chances are you'll forget to revisit your print queue. To overcome the battle between the analog and the digital, here are some simple solutions to printing while mobile:

1. Take your printer on the road

You definitely won't want to carry around a 40-pound (18.1kg) office printer and a portable generator in your car just to print in between appointments. Fortunately, companies like Canon and Epson offer wireless travel printers with batteries that make mobile printing as simple as mobile computing.

Examples of these solutions include the Canon Pixma iP110 ($249, £158, AU$307) and Epson WorkForce WF-100 ($249, £158, AU$307). Delivering print speeds of approximately six pages-per-minute in black-and-white and three pages-per-minute in color, either printer will be able to handle your business documents and office files.

The WF-100 weighs about the same as an Ultrabook, coming in at 3.5 pounds (1.6kg), and measures 12.2 x 6.1 x 2.4 inches (31.0 x 15.5 x 6.1cm). The iP110 weighs slightly more at 4.3 pounds (2kg) and shares similar dimensions to the Epson, measuring 12.7 x 7.3 x 2.5 inches (32.3 x 18.5 x 6.4cm).

The battery is included in the cost of the Epson mobile printer but not with the Canon. It's definitely an accessory that you should invest in if you want to print from the road.

These solutions are great for lawyers, insurance adjusters in the field, contractors who need legal documents signed in person and the executive who may need the occasional hard copy while traveling.

2. Cut the cord

If you're working at a remote office, shared office space or a location that has a workgroup printer, all you need is your phone. If you can connect to the same network that the shared printer is connected to, you can use AirPrint on an iPhone or download a printing app for the printer from the app store and print wirelessly.

Many big printer manufacturers – Canon, Epson, HP, Ricoh, Samsung, Brother and Konica Minolta – offer mobile print apps that allow you to print without much configuration from a phone or tablet. Unfortunately, this solution may not work everywhere, as it requires you to tap into the same Wi-Fi network as the printer, which could be a security imposition on your host.

Some office printers, like the HP Color LaserJet MFP M277dw ($429, £273, AU$528), also offer NFC printing. Owners of NFC-equipped Android and Windows devices can tap their phones and tablets to the printer to initiate printing. Unfortunately, the NFC chip on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus is locked to Apple Pay and won't work with NFC printing.

Solution 3, scanning

3. Go remote

Just because you're out of range of an office's Wi-Fi network doesn't mean you can't print wirelessly. Many printers not only connect to the Wi-Fi network, but are also connected to the internet with their own IP addresses.

Provided you don't require the prints immediately, you can send print jobs to your network-connected printer from anywhere in the world if you're connected to the internet. Then, when you get back to your office, your completed prints will be waiting for you.

If your printer supports remote printing off-network, your manufacturer will enable this feature in the mobile app, similar to Wi-Fi printing. Each manufacturer will have slightly different instructions on configuring the app.

Once the feature is configured, you can use the manufacturer's print app to navigate the internet, go to your cloud storage account or access your emails to print what you need.

I've started to use this feature more when I am working remotely from a coffee shop or checking office emails at lunch, and it has helped me not miss an important document that I otherwise would have forgotten to print.

Not just for printing

If you need the scanning feature from your multifunction office printer, you can also scan on the go. There are portable wireless scanners, like the Epson WorkForce DS-30 ($89, £57, AU$110), if you need a hardware solution.

If you want to cut down on devices to carry while traveling, today's smartphones and tablets come with capable cameras, and there are plenty of third-party scanner apps that allow you to snap a picture of the document you need scanned. Many of these apps will automatically determine the edges of the paper, unskew your photo so it looks like you're taking a scan instead of an off-angled photograph and make crops to trim the background.

If your office has an Adobe subscription, Adobe's Document Cloud service is included in that cost. The cloud-connected mobile app lets you take a photo of your document, save it to the cloud as a PDF, edit it, sign it and password protect it.

Microsoft users should also look at Office Lens, which comes with optical character recognition (OCR) and can convert captured documents into PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint files. There is integration with OneNote, and you can also "scan" receipts and business cards.

And if you're fortunate enough to have a team working with you at the office, they can also use the workgroup multifunction printers to send scans to a shared folder, cloud drive or email address to give you access to physical documents stored at the office that you need while remote.

• Read our picks for the best printers

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