Create Mailing Labels Easily Using Word and Excel

Mailing lists are a great way to stay in touch with friends, loved ones, associates and are indispensable when composing your mails. If you thought mailing lists are used only in dedicated mail programs, think again. MS Office 2003 and 2007, Word and Excel, provide easy ways to create mailing labels and lists that are detailed here.

Start Word.

Choose Mailings and start the step by step mail wizard as shown below.

From the column on the right; Mail Merge, change your document type to labels.

In the Mail merge column click next.

Next choose Label options from the Mail Merge column.

Select your label vendor and product number as shown in the example below.

Click OK to continue, and select next: Select recipients.

Choose to use existing list and browse.

Locate your Excel file and select it to open as shown in the next two examples.

You are prompted to select a table. The file in our example has 3 Excel sheets and our data is in sheet 1.

You should now see the recipients. Now you can choose to remove some that you may not need labels for by removing the check mark from in front of their name. You can also sort, find duplicates, etc…

Click OK and your page will look similar to the one below.

Click Next: Arrange your labels.

On this page select Address Block.

You will see this Window. If it looks OK then click the OK button. You should now see the following.

Choose the Update All button in the right column; Mail Merge.

You should now see this.

Click Next: Preview your labels.

On this page you can edit any mistakes.

If the addresses are too big for your labels either do a Ctrl-A or a Select -> Select All from the Ribbon in Word.

Your labels will all be highlighted. Now go to the Home tab in the Ribbon and change the font size. In this example I go from an 11 to a 10 to get them to fit.

Do not choose a font that is hard to read. Use Calibri, Times, or Courier.

You’re now ready to complete and print your Mail Merge.

You’re now given the option to print or one last chance to edit. I will usually print one page on the test page provided with mail labels or on a blank piece of paper to make sure they are going to work.

You should now have your labels printed.

Wasn’t that easy? Not only did you create mailing lists and added labels for the same but also managed to take a neat print out. All in a matter of few steps. If you need to know other great tricks in Office 2010 or 2007 just drop a comment and we will be glad to assist, as always.