TOPS 8.5 x 11 3/4 Legal Pads, 12 Pack, The Legal Pad Brand, Wide Ruled, White Paper, 50 Sheets Per Writing Pad, Made in the USA (7533) by Tops

Handy pads with lines. All good

Purchased these as a replacement for Staples Basic paper pads, each of which tore off unevenly and were a big mess. These were not much more and perfect. Buy with confidence.

I get these for our office and they are great! The price is reasonable, they tear well, and you can write on them with ease.

Good product at a good price with fast delivery!

I have purchased several 12-packs of these Tops legal pads, No. 7533, so obviously I am happy with them. Some people complain that the back is not sturdy enough for writing on your lap. The chipboard IS thin. Using a professional paper micrometer, we mic’d it at 26 pt. I can write on a full pad without a desk, but as the pad gets low it’s not so good. There is a simple solution if you are willing to invest a few dollars. I consider the price of these pads excellent – ESPECIALLY since they are made in the USA!!! And so, for the money saved on just one 12-pack, over the cost of most other legal pads, you can purchase a clipboard. In the search window, enter “clipboard with low profile clip”. If you do not tear pages off as you complete them, the low profile clip, which is practically flat, will not interfere with flipping the pages over the top.

Amazon often has these clipboards for $4 or $5, sometimes Prime, sometimes as a free Add-On item (free shipping with any $25 order). The hardboard ones are your old style brown clipboard that have been around forever. I like colors, so I’ve ordered at least 7 plastic and transparent ones from Amazon in the last year and they work great. I’ve never had one break, I just use them for different things at one time – legal pad clipped to one for jotting notes when I’m on the phone, To Do List clipped to another, weekly menu on another, running grocery list on another, legal pad clipped to another for taking notes in a conference, etc. (And a spare one on hand for when one gets buried on my desk!)

Amazon has black clipboards for a more professional look, and an aluminum one which costs more, but looks nice. There are also landscape (horizontal rather than vertical) clipboards, if you don’t like even a flat clip at the top. You would turn the clipboard vertical to write of course, which puts the clip on the left side in the margin of the legal pad. The only downside is you would have to lift the clip each time you needed to flip a page over, which takes only a second, but if you are taking notes really fast in a class or conference this might be a problem.

As an off-the subject side note about clipboards: I purchased a Baumgartens Double Panel See-Thru clipboard from Amazon which is kind of neat if you have a paper you need to refer to often while using your clipboard, such as a price list, a measurement conversion chart, a math chart, a percentage chart, a conjugating verbs chart, a phone number list, a list of customers to call on today, or whatever. The chart or paper slips between two pieces of clear acrylic, protecting it from the weather if outdoors, and both sides of it are visible (or two one-sided papers). You can still clip a legal pad on top of it, though only one side would then be visible without lifting the legal pad. Very handy.

If the pages don’t stay flipped over the top as well as you would like (with or without a clipboard, and with ANY legal pad), you can buy an Acco Binder Clip or Sparco Bulldog clip to clip the used pages (that you’ve flipped over the top) to the legal pad or clipboard (if using one) so they stay put.

There are far more favorable reviews than unfavorable for this product, which leads me to believe the folks complaining of bent, folded pages and missing lines must have received the occasional bad batch or “lemon”. I’ve never had ANY of those problems in even one pad.

These pads are stapled high at the top, with a brown paper securely pasted over the top and wrapping around to the back, to hide the staples. The pad is perforated just below that brown paper, and I find the pages tear out very clean and easily if I press the brown paper down with my thumb as I start the tear (and even if I don’t, pages still tear out neatly).

The Product Information Technical Details, at the time of this writing, states the Pad Size is 8.5 x 11.75 (correct), and the Sheet Size is the same, 8-1/2 x 11-3/4 (INcorrect). Once torn out at the perf, the sheet of paper is 8 1/2 x 10 7/8, which I would think passes for 8.5 x 11 in any classroom.

There is a double red line creating a 1.25″ margin on the left, which looks like the standard width to me. There are 28 blue horizontal lines, creating 27 writing spaces. Margin at the top is 1-1/16″, margin at the bottom is barely over 1/2″ (about 9/16″).

The paper IS slightly thin. It mic’d at 3.0 mil. 20# bond is 4.0 mil, so this is 15#. I looked at Wal-Mart since their prices are usually low. They had Ampad legal pads, $28.49 a dozen. Chipboard was 40 pt., which is substantially thicker; paper 15#, same as these. But look at the difference in price. $7.99 vs. $28.49. Office Depot’s best priced pads, their brand, was $11.69 a dozen, 16 pt. paper which isn’t enough to make a difference, 30 pt. chipboard, which is slightly heavier. Cost: almost 50% more. TOPS does make several legal pads with heavier paper and much heavier chipboard, if you’re willing to pay more. 7533 is their economical pad for people who want to pay less and are willing to accept less thickness. If you are submitting this paper to someone you wish to impress (professor, boss, client, prospective customer), you might want to buy more expensive pads. For my uses, these are quite adequate.

I would give these pads a 4 star if I paid a lot for them, because of thin cardboard and paper. But I feel they are an excellent value for the $8 – 9 I’ve paid, so I gave them 5 stars. It seems unfair to buy an obviously “economical choice” legal pad, and then give it a bad rating because it isn’t the highest quality legal pad out there. If high quality is what is needed, it’s unfair to expect it in the lowest priced legal pads. That said, it WOULD be nice if Amazon and Tops provided the thickness of the paper and chipboard in the specs of ALL the legal pads so we could make an informed choice.

I would, I will, and I HAVE, recommended these legal pads.