Avery 5260 template
Avery 5260 is the same thirty-up address label as the 5160, sold in bulk packs for offices that go through sheets quickly.
Dimensions
- Label size
- 1" x 2-5/8"
- Labels per sheet
- 30 (3 across × 10 down)
- Sheet size
- US Letter, 8.5in × 11in
- Top margin
- 0.5in
- Side margin
- 0.1875in
- Horizontal pitch
- 2.75in
- Vertical pitch
- 1in
Geometry source: Avery help: "Avery Labels 1\" x 2-5/8\"" lists 5260 -- same template as 5160.
Check the fit before you print on stock. Print the blank template on plain paper, hold it against a sheet of Avery 5260 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.
Why there are two numbers for one layout
Avery gives a distinct product number to each combination of pack size, material, adhesive and printer compatibility, even when the die-cut grid is unchanged. The 5260 sits in the same template family as the 5160 and the 8160: one inch by two and five-eighths, three across and ten down, thirty labels per US Letter sheet.
For anyone laying out a file, that means the number on the box does not matter as much as the family. Set this tool to any of the three and the output is byte-for-byte the same geometry.
What people use it for
High-volume address work. The bulk pack exists because mailrooms, membership organisations and small e-commerce operations run hundreds of sheets a year and do not want to reorder monthly.
It suits recurring jobs where the same spreadsheet gets reprinted with small edits — a subscriber list, a donor list, a route sheet. Keep the source file, change the rows, print again.
Printing 5260 labels from a spreadsheet
Import the sheet, map columns to label lines, check the preview, print. If your list is longer than thirty rows the tool paginates automatically, and the last partial sheet starts wherever you tell it to.
Run one test page on plain paper first and hold it up to a real sheet against a window. It takes a minute and catches a misconfigured printer before it eats a sheet of stock.
Looking after a bulk pack
Label stock is more sensitive to storage than plain paper. The adhesive and the face material expand and contract at different rates, so sheets left somewhere humid can curl at the edges, and a curled sheet feeds crooked or jams.
Keep the pack flat, in its original wrapper, somewhere dry and at room temperature. Take out only what you are about to print. A sheet that has been sitting on a desk for a month next to a radiator is the usual explanation for a job that suddenly prints skewed when the same file worked fine last time.
Fan a stack lightly before loading it so sheets do not stick together, and where your printer offers a straight-through or rear paper path, use it — fewer bends means less chance of a label lifting on the way through.
Print Avery 5260 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.