Imagine you are a businessman moving your office from the
US to somewhere in Europe or Asia. You pack up all of your
files and ship them across the sea. When you arrive in your
new office, you supply it with local furniture, including
file cabinets.
When you go to unpack the files from your old office, you
just might be surprised at what happens. They will not fit
very well in the new file cabinets. This is because file
cabinets in Europe and Asia are manufactured with slight
different specs than those in the USA. They are built to
hold a different size of paper.
In the United States, the standard paper size is known as
letter size. This is 8.5 inches by 11 inches. However, in
many other parts of the world, the standard paper size is
called A4. A4 paper is slightly thinner and longer than
letter size paper. The exact dimensions of A4 paper are
8.27 inches by 11.69 inches.
Due to this difference in standard paper size, the file
cabinets in other parts of the world will have a little
trouble fitting letter-sized paper. They are designed to
hold slightly longer, thinner hanging files, so
letter-sized paper will not fit very well. But this is not
really much of a problem, because offices can simply
reprint their documents. If you explore your printer or
copier’s capabilities, you will quickly see that most
modern machines can work with both letter-sized and
A4-sized paper. Thus, the conversion is not too difficult.