How do I print Avery address labels?

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Pages isn't designed for doing labels. My guess (& it's only a guess), is that, since labels can be printed directly from Address Book, doing labels in Pages wasn't considered a priority. If you're planning to merge from Address Book, remember that Pages will only merge one name per page.

Try using the software product The Print Shop by Software MacKiev. It will allow you to format address labels for any Avery style number. You can place pictures, graphics, and the text anywhere on the address label area. It's easy to adjust the placement of your address on any inkjet/laser label blanks that may have a design on them. I needed to do Christmas address labels on some Hallmark holly labels that said to use Avery number 5160. The Print Shop lets you use addresses from your Apple Address Book or it lets you create (and name) your own address lists. It was easy to use and much better than using Word. The Print Shop is highly rated and not very expensive. I think this will support Avery return address labels. Good luck!

I am kind of disappointed that the only suggestions are to buy a different program. I just plunked down $80 bucks for iWork '08. MSWord has templates for all avery standard labels out of the box. The avery label package itself contains all the page geometry needed to create your own template by hand (though very tedious and time consuming). For crying out loud I can even download openoffice.org which has a compatible template. As a recent convert back to mac after many long years in the windows world (my last mac was an LCII) I cannot believe what a chore it is turning into to crank out some labels for my xmas cards on my new mac. I hate to get my windows box out of the closet and hook it back up just to load a template in word. Is there really no other answer?

chris,

While there have been suggestions to buy software designed to handle mailing labels, those weren't the only suggestions. Peggy recommended using Address Book, which many people use to produce labels. Address Book is included free on all Intel Macs.

-Dennis

I had the same problem: Specifically printing a single page with the same address (my home address) on each label on the page. Fortunately, I remembered that I had bought the Mac version of MS office for the first Mac we purchased (ibook). The label printing feature is there in Word. If any of you have the MS office suite on your mac, you can do it, easily. Hope this helps one (or more) of you.

Thanks Dennis. I was kind of frustrated earlier since I've really tried to switch back to the Mac full time. I didn't really want to use address book since I'm sending these to my staff and don't really have a need to clutter up my address book with their names. It's more of a one off thing. I'll give it a shot though. Thanks everyone!

I figured out a way to do this using Address Book without resorting to Word or Print Shop. What I did was select the contact I wanted to use to print return address labels -- the same address printed on a page of 30 Avery labels (8160) -- and drag it to the desktop. I selected the resulting vCard on my desktop, clicked the right mouse button (CTRL+mouse-click if you have a one-button mouse) to get the context menu, and selected "Duplicate." I duplicated this one vCard 28 times. I then imported the 29 vCards back into Address Book, but I chose "Keep Both" when the Duplicates warning asked me what I wanted to do. I made sure to check the box "apply to all." I then selected these 30 contact cards (all of the same contact), and selected "File / Print" from the menu bar. In the Address Book area of the print dialog, I selected "Mailing Labels" from the Style pull-down menu. Then I clicked on the Layout tab and selected Avery standard and 8160.

In order to save myself the trouble of having to do all this over again, I selected Save to PDF from the PDF drop-down menu at the bottom left corner. That way, I can print out these return address labels any time. After all that, I deleted the extra 29 copies of the contact.

I know this wasn't as easy as doing it in Word, but if you don't have Word and don't want to buy extra software, this is how to do it with a standard installation of Mac OS 10.5.

You have got to be kidding me! I never imagined myself reading let alone posting in a thread like this. All I want to do is print a sheet of return address labels like you can easily do in Word. I have Word, but like others, I was trying to avoid Microsoft programs entirely. I thought Paages would do it for sure. Then I figured if it wasn't part of pages, it must be in address book. How can this be? I'm seriously disappointed.

I also am a new convert from windows and was equally shocked that Pages does not support label creation. This for me is such a such a common application and I suspect that it is for many users. What I did as a temporary fix is to create the most common label that I use which for me is a shipping label using Word which is still in the test period. I then saved the document and then reopened it using Pages . To my relief it did correctly deal with the format. This is now my template for shipping labels. This seems like an unbelievably unnecessary workaround to me. Maybe they just don't have an agreement with Avery. It seems like a simple enough procedure and one that could be easily fixed. I will probably switch to the Microsoft Word 2008 when it comes out and this is one of the reasons.

*I recently purchased a IWORK license on line, rather than have a CD shipped to me. In the past (IWork 2006) for the same cost, I actually had two licenses, which I used to update two of my computers. Since I didn't see anything in the e-mail response from Apple, other than a new license code, I'm wondering if I can use it for updating two Macs in our family?

D,

Your license agreement states that a single-user copy of iWork may reside on only one computer at a time.

I don't really understand your statement about having two licenses for the same cost. Does that have anything to do with your current situation?

-Dennis

Here is a suggestion - download NeoOffice. It's a FREE, open source Wordprocessor (also has spreadsheet, database, etc.) for the Mac and it contains the ability to print Avery Labels. In fact, it has more features than Page. I use Page as my primary wordprocessor but if I need something more complicated, I use NeoOffice.
Go to:

http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

Thanks, stbob, for posting your workaround. I too am a recent switcher from Windows and needed to print a page of return address labels in a real hurry yesterday. I was stunned to find out that there wasn't a menu item in Pages to let me do it.

I googled the problem and your post popped up, and 10 minutes later I had my labels. Hard to believe that that is the easiest way to do this, but you really saved my day.

Head to the Avery site and user their Design and Print tool. You select the label type from their huge list and it generates a PDF. Print the PDF with the sheet of labels in your printer and boom you've got a page of return address labels.

http://www.avery.com/us/print/index.html

Avery also has Mac Label Expert software you can download for free. I just installed it (requires Stuffit to extract the .sit file) and it is working fine on Leopard. http://www.avery.co.uk/uk1/downloads/maclabelexpert.jsp