Printing Address Labels and doing Mail Merges

Simplest (same label printed multiple times)

  • New Word document
  • Mailings => Labels
  • Click New document and save it where you want
  • Enter the address in the first cell
  • Click Labels again
  • Click Print
  • Save document

Doing a mailout

  • (I have a Xmas card label example in Dropbox, in Letters folder, for 2021 GiftCrabs)
  • Get your spreadsheet ready:
    • Column names in your spreadsheet should match the field names you want to insert in your mail merge.
    • All data to be merged on first sheet of your spreadsheet.
    • Format in the spreadsheet so that Word can properly read values.
    • spreadsheet stored on your local machine.
  • Get your Word doc ready:
    • New Word document
    • Mailings => Start mail merge => Labels
      • Select label type (for me it’s generally L7163, I think?) and click OK
    • File => Save
    • Mailings => Select Recipients => Use an existing list => select your spreadsheet
      • Check the header checkbox at bottom if relevant
      • When I did this I got a second dialog asking me to choose a table
        • It seemed to create its own spreadsheet called Letters.xls
        • I cancelled out of this without selecting anything and everything seemd to work after that??
    • Mailings => Edit Recipient List => uncheck anyone you don’t want to include
    • Mailings => Address Block
      • Defaults will probably work fine
      • If anything missing, click Match Fields, bottom right
    • Mailings => Update labels
      • Now you’ll see the whole page fill with your addresses
    • Save the file
    • Mailings => Preview results
      • This will only show you the first page
      • beware using next and previous buttons
        • it has the weird effect of just shifting everything forward by one record, rather than taking you to next page of results
    • Mailings => Finish & Merge => Print documents
      • Click Properties in the print dialog and check
        • it has A4 selected
        • select tray 1, otherwise it wants you to use a different tray
        • check it’s not printing on both sides
      • Print on ordinary paper first to see the effect
      • When you finally put labels into the printer tray, put the label side facing UP.
      • If you select From/To, use integers to indicate records
        • These will be using row numbers from spreadsheet
        • but they ignore the header row
        • So your first row will be row 1, even if you have headers and it’s actually row 2.
  • Save everything
    • When you save the mail merge document, it stays connected to your data source. You can reuse the mail merge document for your next bulk mailing.
    • Open the mail merge document and choose Yes when Word prompts you to keep the connection.