How to Create Mailing Labels
If you want to send a mass mailing to an address list that you maintain in a Microsoft Excel worksheet, you can use a Microsoft Word mail merge. The mail merge process creates a sheet of mailing labels that you can print, and each label on the sheet contains an address from the list.
To create and print the mailing labels, you must first prepare the worksheet data in Excel, and then use Word to configure, organize, review, and print the mailing labels. When you want to use address labels to send a mass mailing to your address list, you can use mail merge to create a sheet of address labels. Each label contains an address from your list.
The mail merge process entails the following overall steps:
- Prepare the worksheet data in Excel for the mail merge. Before you begin the mail merge process, your address list must match the tabular structure that mail merge requires.
- Set up the labels for the mail merge in Word. You set up the layout of the labels one time, for all of the labels in the mail merge. In a mail merge, the document that you use to do this is called the main document. In the label main document, you can also set up any content that you want
repeated on each label, such as a company logo or your return address on shipping labels. - Connect the labels to your worksheet data. Your address list is the data source that Microsoft Word uses in the mail merge. In this case, it is an Excel worksheet that contains the addresses to be printed on the labels.
- Refine the list of recipients that you want to include on the labels. Word generates a label for each address in your mailing list. If you want to generate labels for only certain addresses in your mailing list, you can choose which addresses, or records, to include.
- Add placeholders, called mail merge fields, to the labels. When you perform the mail merge, the mail merge fields are filled with information from your address list.
- Preview, complete them
merge, and print the labels. You can preview each label before you print the whole set. - Save the labels for future use