Avery 5161 template
Avery 5161 is the wide address label: still one inch tall, but four inches across, two to a row instead of three.
Dimensions
- Label size
- 1" x 4"
- Labels per sheet
- 20 (2 across × 10 down)
- Sheet size
- US Letter, 8.5in × 11in
- Top margin
- 0.5in
- Side margin
- 0.1563in
- Horizontal pitch
- 4.1875in
- Vertical pitch
- 1in
Geometry source: LibreOffice label database, Avery Letter Size 5161 (2 x 10, 4.1875in x 1in pitch).
Check the fit before you print on stock. Print the blank template on plain paper, hold it against a sheet of Avery 5161 up to the light, and check the boxes land on the die-cuts. That is worth doing with any label template on any printer — paper size, driver margins and print scaling all shift a sheet, and one sheet of plain paper is cheaper than one sheet of labels. It is worth doing here in particular: these measurements are taken from an open label-template database and checked arithmetically on every build, and that same database’s Avery 5160 entry reproduces our own print-verified geometry exactly — but Avery 5161 has not itself been confirmed against physical stock.
What the extra width buys you
A 5160 is two and five-eighths inches wide, which is enough for most domestic addresses and tight for anything longer. Company names, department lines, apartment and suite numbers, and international addresses all run past it and get shrunk or cut.
Four inches solves that. The same three-line address that had to shrink on a 5160 sits at full size here, and a long organisation name fits on one line instead of wrapping awkwardly onto two.
What people use it for
Business correspondence, where the recipient line is a person and the line below is a company. Also common for shipping small parcels, filing systems, and any list where the source data has a long free-text field you do not want truncated.
It is the natural upgrade when someone has been printing on 5160 sheets and keeps complaining that the addresses come out too small to read.
Printing 5161 labels from a spreadsheet
Twenty labels per sheet means a hundred addresses is five sheets. Map your columns, set the font size per line — the recipient line usually wants to be larger than the rest — and print.
Because the label is wide relative to its height, barcode mode has more room here than on a 5160. A wider symbol means wider bars, and wider bars scan more reliably.
Height is still the constraint
Widening the label solves horizontal crowding and does nothing at all for vertical crowding. A 5161 is exactly as tall as a 5160, so it holds the same three comfortable lines — you simply get to keep them at full size rather than shrinking them.
If what you actually need is a fourth or fifth line, width will not deliver it. The 5162 is the same four inches across but a third taller, and that extra height is the only thing that adds a usable line.
A reasonable way to decide: count the longest address in your list, and count the most lines any address needs. Long lines point to a 5161. Many lines point to a 5162. Both point to a 5163.
Print Avery 5161 labels
1 Your spreadsheet
.xlsx, .xls or .csv. The file is read inside this tab and never uploaded.
2 What goes on each label
Drawn as a Code 128 symbol in vector, not as an image.
Assign a column to each line. Lines you leave unused are skipped, so the remaining lines close up rather than leaving a gap.
Pick a column holding a count to repeat each row that many times.
3 Label sheet
Skip labels you have already peeled off a part-used sheet.
4 Preview and print
Single label
First page
Print at actual size. Never use “Fit to page” or “Shrink to fit” — either one moves every label out of alignment with the sheet.
Other Avery formats
Sizes, uses and a full comparison are on the Avery template index.