If you’ve recently been put in charge of ordering the paper for your office or you’re a small business owner looking to get some for yourself, you may have already found out that there are more choices than you might have known. In addition to the standard paper sizes, there are a variety of textures, colours and densities that you will invariably have to consider when deciding on the needs of your office. In this article, we take a look at a few of the most important things you’ll need to consider when making this decision.

A few terms to get you started

If you’re looking to buy an A4 paper bundle buy online, doing some research can help ensure that you don’t spend money on a whole stack of paper that is otherwise useless to you. Although they might all look the same (apart from the different packaging, of course), getting the right paper can help save you a lot of money in the long run. First, you should understand some very basic terms related to paper, whether or not it’s A4 or not. For businesses that require the use of a lot of paper in their daily operations, reams is an important term to understand. Basically, a ream is a unit of measurement that indicates that you are buying paper in bulk and usually translates to 450 or 500 sheets. Purchasing paper in this way is more cost efficient than buying it in smaller quantities, particularly if you’re buying your reams in bulk as well. If you plan on printing on both sides of a piece of paper, the opacity of the paper is another important detail that you shouldn’t ignore. The opacity translates to the translucency of a piece of paper, so a piece of paper that is particularly translucency would obviously be terrible to print double sided on!

The weight of your paper matters

One of the most important things you’ll need to wrap your head around is gsm, which stands for grams per square metre. This translates to the thickness of the paper, as a thicker paper will weigh more when compared to a thinner example. The thickness of the paper you choose might be important as a result of your need to print certain documents that need a bit of heft, but buying heavy paper for the sake of it can cost a lot of unnecessary money in the long run. The average ream of A4 paper will usually come with either 70gsm or 80 gsm paper, and these will be more than fine for most office environments as this thickness is great for both printing and photocopying. If you need more specialised paper, it’s absolutely possible to get reams of heavier paper for your office – 120 gsm is ideal for flyers, brochures and similar marketing materials, for example.

What paper do you need for your office?

If you’re unsure about what paper is right for your needs, it’s always worth going to a stationery store and checking through their paper materials to get a better understanding of how the different thicknesses feel. If you’re still unsure about what gsm thickness is necessary, take a few samples home and print directly on them!