What does collate mean in printing?

You hit print on a 10-page document, ask for 5 copies, and a checkbox says "collate." Tick it or not? The difference decides whether you spend the next ten minutes sorting paper by hand.

The simple definition

Collate means the printer produces complete, ordered sets. For five copies of a three-page document, collated gives you 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, and so on: five finished booklets ready to staple.

Uncollated does the opposite. It prints all the copies of page one, then all of page two, then all of page three: 1-1-1-1-1, 2-2-2-2-2, 3-3-3-3-3. You end up with neat stacks of single pages that you then have to interleave yourself.

When to collate

Turn collate on whenever the output is meant to be read or handed out as a set: reports, handouts, contracts, booklets, anything multi-page that goes to a person. The printer does the sorting so you don't.

When to leave it off

Uncollated is useful in a few specific cases. If you are printing one page in bulk, say 200 copies of a single flyer, collation is irrelevant. And if you plan to bind or pad the sheets by page, like a tear-off notepad where every sheet is identical, you want all the same pages stacked together.

A note for print buyers

If you are ordering printed booklets, folders, or document sets from a commercial printer, "collated" is usually the default and is built into the finishing quote. The same goes for two-pocket presentation folders that hold a set of pages: see our 3-prong folders for binding hole-punched, collated sets.

So: collated for finished sets in order, uncollated for stacks of identical pages. For almost every real document, you want it collated.