Envelopes and Labels

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There are only a few things I don’t like, but they’ve been around forever and confused so many people. And people get confused even more if they aren’t aware that they must use the Mail Merge menu features if they want to create mail merged envelopes or labels.

Envelopes

A lot of people have difficulty with the Envelopes because of the way you’re asked to load the envelope into the printer. I personally hate it because I can only print the envelope once. I cannot quickly create three or four envelopes.

Tip 10: Fast Envelopes

Create a new document.
Go to File Page setup. For the paper size, choose Com10 or business envelope; choose Landscape layout.
Choose the paper source (the envelope feed tray or manual feed tray, whichever the case may be).
Set the margins approximately as follows or adjust as necessary:

Top: 2.25"

Bottom: 0.5"

Left: 4.25"

Right: 0.5"
Hit Ctrl+A and change the font as desired. Save the file as a template called envelope.dot and close it.

Now, whenever you want to create an envelope, just hit File → New and choose the template. You can create many by hitting Ctrl+Enter (to insert a page break) after each address is typed.

If you want a return address, you can insert it as a header in the envelope.

Labels

The labels are pretty self-explanatory, but there are a couple of things that confuse people.

First is the fact that if you want a whole sheet of labels into which you can type any address you want, you need to hit the New Document button after you’ve selected your label type.

Not only that, but if you commonly use a specific label type, you can save this “new document” as a template. Thereafter, you can hit File → New and pick your labels template without having to choose the label type each time, etc.

A very important note: Please be sure you are viewing table gridlines whenever working with labels. To my knowledge, all the label formats are created using tables. If you’re not viewing table gridlines, you can easily get lost in the structure of your labels.

To show gridlines in your tables, hit Table Show Gridlines. It’s the last menu option under the Tables menu. If you don’t see it, but you do see Hide Gridlines, then you’re already viewing table gridlines.

Another thing: Most people have no need to download the Avery wizards. The most common of the product templates are already installed with Word.

Do not bother trying to access these templates by finding a file on your PC—they don’t exist. I believe that Word contains programming code to create them on-the-fly.

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