

But understanding the term collate, and the difference between collate and non-collate printing, can help save you time. Collation makes sense in majority of cases, and so in many cases the print shop might assume you would like the sheets collated if you don’t explain otherwise.Įven if you didn’t know what collate printing means, there is a very high likelihood that you have often used collate printing.
COLLATE PRINTER PROFESSIONAL
If you are using professional printing services and don’t want your documents delivered to you collated, mention this to the printer. This sort of scenario might find application at trade shows, in seminars, in classrooms, or in particular office environments.
COLLATE PRINTER SERIES
You are printing business cards for multiple people. If you have the designs for a series of business cards all saved into one file with each individual business card on a single page, collate printing probably isn’t the best way to print this file.Here are a few common scenarios in which you might want to uncheck the collate option on in your printer settings:

The benefits of collated vs not collated ultimately depends on your application. Photo by Marcin Wichary.ĭepending on how you intend to use your copies and the way your digital file is set up, collate printing may not be ideal. When should non-collate printing be used? Business cards are an example of prints that probably shouldn’t be collated. As long as the document file uses the correct layout, automated collation is time efficient for both perfect bound and saddle stitch binding methods. When printing in Microsoft Word, collated copies are set as default.Ĭollate printing is also used prior to binding leaflets and books. Whenever you print a document from your computer, the check box for collated copies is usually already ticked.
COLLATE PRINTER PDF
You have probably used collated printing more often than uncollated printing, because the vast majority of Microsoft Word and PDF documents are meant to print out in collations. Because the sheets of paper will already be grouped in sets with the proper order, collated print jobs can save you a lot of time, hassle, and paper cuts.Ĭollate printing is hugely useful, and for this reason it typically comes standard in most home and office printers. Photo by Mark Ordonezįor example, if you need handouts for several dozen people, collating the copies means you won’t have to manually sort the pages after they’ve finished printing. The more pages in the document and the more copies you need, the more time you can save through collated printing. But thanks to technological advancements, we can take for granted the fact that even the most basic home printers can automatically collate our documents for us.Ĭollate printing should be used anytime when you need a number of copies of a multi-page document that is meant to be read sequentially. This means that collated print jobs produce sets of documents that come out of the printer in the correct order.ĭocuments can also be collated manually – as they always were in the days of printing press. In this context, collated documents are those whose individual sheets are automatically printed as logical sets. The term collate has many different applications, but in printing terminology it refers to a specific automated print setting. The definition of collate simply means to group text or information together in a logical order.

