MS Excel Address Labels

If you want to make a template for an address label in Microsoft Excel, you can. It’s really using the wrong tool. You should be using Microsoft Excel as a pseudo database to merge with a Microsoft Word Primary document to create a printable secondary merge document. It’s kind of odd that someone would want to print labels directly from Excel. I mean really, who has Excel, and doesn’t have a copy of Word? Well, it’s definitely doable.
Microsoft makes a template for the Avery 5160 which is the same as the ML-3000.

Microsoft has their own version here:

ML-3000 Address Labels

There are lots of great things about the ML-3000 labels. They are high quality, lignin free, and acid free. They really stick well to envelopes and paper, and are perfect for printing a lot of address on. One thing you might not have noticed are the perforations between each of the columns. If you’re printing and peeling a ton of labels, you’ve got to find things to cut down on time spent messing with getting the labels off of the sheet. I know there are many mail houses out there that have their own little methods to make things speed along. Well, these perforations really help. Just fold along the perforations, and tear the columns away from each other. Having the columns of label being separated is a huge help. Rather than handling a full sheet and trying to get the labels off the big sheet, taking labels off the individual columns is so much easier. So take advantage of the perfs, and get our ML-3000 labels.

Post Halloween Sugar High

My 18 year old still goes trick or treating, seriously. And I’m not discouraging her from going either. Hey, I get to mooch off of her for a change. Free candy. I like a lot of stuff she doesn’t. I like the dark chocolate, she likes the milk chocolate. I like the Necco Wafers, she likes Twizzlers. I like York Peppermint Patties, she likes Tootsie Rolls. Needless to say, my blood sugar right now is what you call high. I have hummingbirds buzzing me sniffing the sugar oozing out of my pores. It’s not a good situation.

Right now I feel like Augustus Gloop:

All this sugar consumption, and so close to the elections? Very suspicious. I have a theory. I think that elections are affected adversely by people who vote with high blood sugar levels. People are going to the polls under the influence of sugar. Just look at the state of our country, the economy is in the tank, unemployment is high. Blame it on the sugar.

What does this has to do with labels? Hmmm. gimmie a minute, I’ll tie it in somehow.
OK, I’ve got it. Wait, no. Ok, wait. Ok, here goes. No, that’s no good. Ok, now I’ve really got it. Elections. Somebody has to win the elections tomorrow on election day. If you’re Republican, use our ML-3000 address labels to do mass mailings to Democrats and Independents in your neighborhood and convince them to vote Republican. If you’re a Democrat, you’d use our labels to mail out convincing reasons to vote for Democrats to Republicans and Independents. Hurry up, you’ve only got a few hours.

Address Label Mail Merge

Some lady just called. She said she needed help printing labels on our ML-3000 address labels. She said she had about 600 customers names to do a mailing with, and all she had was the blank ML-3000 template that we supplied. I told her I was sorry, but I could not spend the time on the phone to teach her how to do a mail merge…..on the phone. Teaching a person to do a mail merge in person is hard enough, but doing over the phone is fun. By fun I mean not fun. I have experience in this department. In leaner days, when I had time to help folks in this area, I would spend some time to show people what to do. But different people have very different learning curves. The process could take some time varying from about 20 minutes to .. well, forever. So, folks, learn to use the Google machine and put in the phrase Microsoft Word Mail Merge into the search box in google, and start clicking, because we sell labels. While we would love to teach you how to do a mail merge, it just does not make economic sense.

Seeing the Label – the OO edition

I should have included this little tidbit a couple of posts ago, but I didn’t think of it until today. I was poking around in Open Office (OO), and I wondered how difficult it would be to find the same function that I was talking about in that post. I just wanted to be able to turn on or turn off, depending on my need, the non-printing borders that are the borders of each cell in the table of a label. I’m using an ML-3000 label here for example. It seems OpenOffice made it a bit easier to find this feature than in Microsoft Word. Simply go to Table, then Table Boundaries. It’s a toggle, so click to go back and forth between having the lines visible or invisible, and you’ll be seeing the label, or not.

The above picture is an ML-3000 template available here.

Address Label Templates

We’re on a mission. A mission to create a large collection of address templates and we’ve got a long way to go. We already have blank address label and shipping label templates located here. But maybe you need more than blank templates.
I think labels that have a watermark, or at least have a background that is a different from the font color are the only kind you can print on. If you have solid colors on a label, you’re going to use a lot of ink, and you’re not going to be able to see the address when it prints. So check out some of our ML-3000 templates:

It’s gonna be a hot one

It’s the first day of summer, or the Summer Solstice, today June 21 2010. It’s the longest day of the year. Things are heating up already, and it feels like it’s gonna be a hot summer. It was so hot that lady Gaga was taking her clothes off at the Yankee Game.
We’ve got some heat of our own. Our ML-3000’s are our hottest sellers, here’s a new template design:

2010 World Cup

Yup, it’s that time soccer fans. It’s the first day of World Cup Soccer play. Soccer is almost as big as Hockey in the States. I’m just kidding soccer fans. Lighten up. Get ready for the world cup with these little world cup trophies on ML-3000 templates.

Label Application tips

If you’re doing a mailing using the ML-3000, here are a few tips to make your mailing easier. Looking at the ML-3000, you’ll notice that there are perforations between each of the three columns. Separating these columns makes peeling the labels from the page much easier.

If you’re using the ML-0200 half sheet labels, don’t peel the label off of the sheet, peel the backing sheet off of the label. That way the paper won’t curl so much, and will be easier to apply.

On this, the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day

For Earth Day Be kind to mother earth and use labels made from recycled paper: