Print stacks of business cards that cut correctly (cut & stack)

You’re printing cards or labels many-up, cutting the stack on a guillotine, and the piles need to stay in sequence afterwards. Cut & Stack arranges your records so that once the sheets are cut and the piles are stacked, each pile already reads in the right order – no manual collating.

Before you start

• Your data loaded and a layout for a single card.
• An idea of how many cards fit on your sheet.

Step 1 – Lay out the sheet in the Layout document

In the Layout document, place your single card and copy it across the sheet, arranging the copies many-up. The order in which you copy and arrange the cards is the order your data flows into them – arrange left to right and records merge left to right. That ordering is what keeps every pile in sequence after the stack is cut.

📷 Screenshot [NEU]: the Layout document with the card copied and arranged across the sheet

Step 2 – Connect the placeholders in the node editor

Switch to the Editor. On your single card, add the data nodes you need (for text fields, Add node → Data → Static Text) and connect every placeholder – name, title, phone, e-mail, and so on – to its data column, exactly as in a normal merge. You only set up this one card; DataMergeStudio applies the same mapping to every copy across the imposed sheet.

📷 Screenshot [NEU]: the node editor with all of the card’s placeholders connected to their data columns

Step 3 – Choose Imposition and set the Cut & Stack counts

Open Export → Merge Mode and select Imposition. The Cut & Stack options appear immediately. Set records per layout, layouts per set, and sets per stack to match your sheet and your guillotine workflow.

📷 Screenshot [NEU]: the Merge Mode panel with Imposition selected and the Cut & Stack counts

Step 4 – Choose a last-stack strategy

Decide how the leftover records on the final, partially filled stack are handled – Full Stack, Full Set, or Fill Sheet. See Cut & Stack strategies for what each one does.

📷 Screenshot [NEU]: the last-stack strategy selector

Step 5 – Preview and validate

Open the Preview (the eye icon, top right) to check the result, then click Validate all records (the button in the bottom-right corner of the workspace) before committing to a large print run.

Step 6 – Export

Click Validate & Export at the bottom of the Export view. DataMergeStudio produces the imposed, cut-&-stack-ordered output, ready to print.

Result

After printing, cutting, and stacking, each pile reads in the right order – no manual collating.

Related

• Imposition mode
• Cut & Stack
• Cut & Stack strategies