I don’t know about you, but I make use of Microsoft Office to handle my mailing lists. I use Excel to keep the actual lists and then use Word to print address labels and do mail merge. This combination works extremely well.
A list of public libraries from a government website imported into Excel
However, I discovered something today about address label printing that might save you some stress. Word has a great address label printing setup. I print all my labels in one hit for mailouts. I went to Office Works today to buy some more labels and bought some Avery labels, as I usually do. Avery seems to be the big brand for labels. Anyway, I got them, went home and tried to tell Word which label it was and discovered that that line of Avery labels were not predefined in Word. Trip back to Office Works and a swap fixed the issue.
The label printing wizard in Mac Office 2008 (it is similar in other versions)
It seems that Avery have two lines of labels that you can print on the computer. The ones that Office supports are the ones with an Avery/Software Code comprising one letter and four digits, such as the L7161 I use. The other line have a Code similar to DL24 and are NOT supported directly by Office. Now you can still use them if you want the hassle of manually defining all the label sheet sizes by hand. But life is too short and there is too much writing to do for this. Now Avery do have templates for all their labels on their website, but this is not the same as having Word know the shapes and layout for automatic placement.
So if you are going to print address labels out of Office, and I recommend you do, make sure to buy a label that Office supports.
There are also dedicated label printers that do one label at a time. These are great for single labels as you write letters but if you maintain mailing lists and have a lot of letters to send out, label sheets are a better way to go.
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