Mail Merge Address Labels Using Avery.com

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share with you how I used Avery.com to print all of my holiday address labels for free.

This is my annual seasonal challenge -- what is the best and easiest way to print address labels for my holiday cards?  I keep my addresses in a Google spreadsheet, which I update each year.  For a couple of years, I used a GSheets Add-on from Avery called "Create and Print Labels -- Labelmaker", but the formatting was awful and then they discontinued the free version, so you have to pay 80 buck for a lifetime license.  Which, honestly, doesn't make ANY sense to me.  I mean -- you'd think that Avery would make money from their labels, right?  Wouldn't they be able to sell MORE labels if they could make it easier to use them?  Last year, I resorted to firing up Microsoft Excel and Word in order to produce my labels, but I'm always salty when I have take steps back in time to use local software to accomplish something that I think should be available in the cloud.

So, this year, when I ordered my labels, I noticed that they had free templates available from avery.com/templates, so I checked it out.  Turns out they offer a fairly full featured, data merge application for free on their website.  And even better, they have lots of fancy images and formatting, so you don't have to be a graphic designer or struggle to fix the formatting, which would eat up a bunch of time for me each year.  Let me walk you through the process.

First, go to avery.com/templates.  I happened to get my labels through Avery, so I have the product code, but even knock off labels will let you know which Avery label they are compatible with.  So, for me -- I'm using the style that has 30 labels per sheet, so I type in the product number here and click on the product that comes up.  Apparently, you can have them print your labels if you don't have a printer, but I'm going to go through the process where I print my own labels at home. 

So, hit the button "Start Designing."  Now, you can see over to the left here, that the label templates are grouped by category.  Most of these are address labels, but there are also some labels that wrap around Hershey's Nuggets and some other kinds of stickers.  I'm printing address labels for holiday cards, so I go straight to the Holiday category.  From here, I choose Christmas and look at all of these fantastic designs!  I can't tell you how much time I've spent in the past trying to get the tiniest, simplest clipart to work on one of these labels -- not always successfully.  So I choose one and hit "Select this Design." 

Now, this screen looks a little complicated, but I swear I had labels ready to print within 5 minutes, so it really wasn't that bad.  If you just want to print a full page of the same address -- like you are doing return address labels, you can just click on this text box, edit it with your information.  But before you do that -- make sure that you have the correct mode selected.  If you just want your changes to affect one label, pick Edit One.  If you want your changes to affect all of the labels on the sheet, pick Edit All.  That way, any change that you make applies to all of the labels.  When you have it just the way you want it, hit Preview and Print where you can see what the sheet will look like.  Zoom in up here if you want to see more detail.  If it looks good, hit the button to Print it Yourself.  I'm going to choose to print all, but you could select a custom range of pages and hit Get PDF to Print.  Avery will encourage you to save your labels before printing, which requires that you make an account.  They give you some printer tips for making everything come out properly and hit Open PDF.  You should be able to print right from this page.  Now, if you are worried that the labels won't print right, just print this PDF on a regular piece of paper and then hold it along with your label sheet up to the light to make sure everything is going to fit on the labels.  In some cases due to a printer issue or when you are using off brand labels, you may need to adjust the print alignment, which you can do from this screen and tell it to adjust everything up or over a certain number of milimeters. 

Now let's talk about doing an mail merge for the address labels of your card recipients.

Go back to choosing a design -- if your labels are a different size, then go back one farther and pick a new template.  Pick a design that you like and hit "Select this Design".  Now make sure that you like the image placement, and the font, justification, and size of the text.  If you want to adjust any of these elements, click to the left here.  You can even add a custom image if you are doing a logo or a custom design. 

In order to use the formatting from the design, you need to select the text box before you hit "Import Data Mail Merge".  Then click on "Start Import/Merge."  You can pick a file from your computer as long as it is in one of the acceptable formats (CSV or Excel) OR, and this is what I love about this, you can pick a file straight from your Google Drive, but you will need to sign into your account.  Uncheck your header row and any other rows you don't want to print, and hit next.  This is the screen where you will choose which fields will go where.  Double click to get the fields into your document and arrange them as you want them, adding spaces, commas or other punctuation as necessary.   Once this is complete, click on finish and you can see your labels.  If Avery has added a new text box, you may need to select the properly formatted text box and try the mail merge again.  At this point, you can make changes to all of the labels (by making sure that the mode it set to Edit All) or you can edit individual labels by turning on "Edit One".  A word of warning, editing individual labels can be super annoying, so to the extent possible, make your changes in the data source and then reimport the mail merge data.  It will save you some headaches.  Once you have everything the way you want it, hit preview and print to see the PDF.  You can see each page by clicking up here.  If it looks good, click on Print it Yourself, choose to print all or a custom set of pages, and select "Get PDF to Print."  Then save your work and hit Open PDF to print to your computer. 

I can't tell you how much easier I have found this process than the countless others that I have tried.  AND because of the beautiful designs, the labels look downright professional!  Let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!