Avery 8163 template

Same grid, different stock

Avery lists 5163 and 8163 under one template, and the measurements agree: two columns of five, four inches by two, a half-inch top margin and a five-thirty-seconds side margin. Anything laid out for one prints correctly on the other.

The difference is the face material. Inkjet coating absorbs liquid ink so it dries without smudging; laser stock is engineered to survive a fuser. Using the wrong one produces either a smeared label or, worse, adhesive residue inside a hot printer.

Getting clean output on inkjet

Set your printer to its best quality setting and to a label or heavy paper media type. Draft mode lays down less ink and produces grey, soft edges — fine for a test, not for a parcel that has to survive a sorting facility.

Let sheets dry before stacking them. Inkjet output on coated stock stays tacky for a few seconds longer than it does on plain paper, and a stack pressed together too early transfers ink between labels.

Printing 8163 labels from a spreadsheet

Load a spreadsheet, map columns to the four or five lines a two-inch label comfortably holds, and print. Barcode mode is available and has ample room at this size.

If you are printing barcodes on inkjet, check them with a real scanner before committing to a large run. Ink spread widens bars slightly, and the calibration sheet exists precisely to find where your printer stops being reliable.

Shipping labels and the weather

Standard 8163 stock is uncoated paper with water-based inkjet ink on it, and neither part of that survives rain. A parcel label that spends an afternoon on a damp doorstep can end up unreadable, and a barcode that has run is worse than no barcode at all because it may still scan as the wrong thing.

If parcels will be handled outdoors, either use a clear label pouch over the top, cover the label with wide packing tape, or move to a weatherproof stock. Taping over a barcode is usually fine — scanners cope with a matte tape layer — but avoid tape that wrinkles across the bars, because a ripple through the symbol distorts exactly the widths the scanner is measuring.

Laser output on 5163 stock is more robust than inkjet in the wet, since toner is fused plastic rather than absorbed dye. It is not waterproof either, but it smears far less.