Choosing The Right Staples

Staples are one of those tiny things in your office that can make a big difference in how neat and organized or ugly and disorganized your documents can be. If you"re not using the right staples for the job, the documents might end up with ugly holes "" from you constantly trying to staple the documents together and not quite succeeding "" or worse, the documents might come lose and, depending on how bad it is, you might go slightly bonkers.

Imagine working half of the day putting together a well-researched report, printing it in beautiful, immaculate, white paper only for the wrong staples to mess everything up and, worse, cause you to misplace some of the pages.

Finding the right staples just makes a lot of sense because staples keep documents that are supposed to stay together, well, together. Staples are also inexpensive and readily available. And they"re so small and unobtrusive that your focus goes straight to the document.

Staples commonly used for paper are tiny zinc-plated steel wires. There are, however, staples made of stainless steel. They don"t rust but they are also considerably more expensive than the regular staples. Staple strips are typically manufactured and sold as "full strips." This means that the strip has 210 staples.

Deciding on the staples goes with deciding on the stapler because only a specific size of staples will fit a stapler. So if you will be putting together bulky documents, choose larger staples and the stapler that can accommodate staples of this size.

But there are certain instances when you need to begin with getting the right stapler for the job. You might, for example, need to use heavy duty metal staplers. Or, if you are looking at a large volume of documents to staple, you might need an electric staple. Your everyday office stapler, the full strip office stapler, won"t work for bigger pieces of paper; for that you will need a long arm stapler.

Staples for paper come in many different sizes. The staples commonly used in the office or at school are the 6 mm staples. For documents 20, 40 or even 100 pages thick, you will need heavy-duty staples. You can also check out speedpoint staples, the kind of staples that have sharper prongs that pierce through paper even better than regular staples.

Some brands of staplers require you to use only their brand of staples "" other brands, even if they may look the same and of the same size, will not fit. Staple sizes for the smaller staplers include No. 10, 26/6, 24/8, 24/6, 13/8 and 13/6. Heavy duty staplers, on the other hand, typically require staples in size 23/12, 23/8, 23/20, 13/14, 23/15, 13/10, and 23/24. Sizes in "fraction" like 23/24 indicate the gauge of the wire over the length staple"s leg in millimeters.

Staples are usually available in packs of 5000 tiny staples. Choose a reliable brand and buy from the vendor that you can trust. The most commonly used size of staples, the 6 mm staples, usually comes in office bundles.