how to print address labels?

Look in the Print dialog box of Address Book it has templates for a wide variety of labels in: Layout/Label.

You can import data from tab delimited text files, which you can export from Excel.

See Importing contacts from other applications in Address Book Help.

Peter

What about mailings to addresses that you don't want to keep permanently in your address book? I frequently have to send out mailings to notify people of work being done on a neighbor's house. Is there a way to set up a document to print to standard avery labels?

• Create a new User account.
• In this account import all your special contacts to AddressBook.
• Print from AddressBook in this new user account.
• Return to this account next year to print the special list again

Jerry

Address book supports Spouse/partner/friend name but the label printing function you describe does not seem to and I can see how to same a version that I can edit to manually add the missing partners. What can I do? I also just bought Pages in the hopes of help there with this be haven't figured it out.

Unfortunately that's not practical, since these mailings are unique each time they are done. They could happen every few months, or once or twice a year depending on the projects I'm working on (I'm an architect).

I did find an Avery template at iworkcommunity.com. I use the 5160 which I found here: http://www.iworkcommunity.com/content/avery-labels-address-book-merge

but if you do a search of Avery Labels you can find most of the others you need. This works for what I'm trying to do as I had to type in all the addresses fresh each time anyway.

Merging with address book doesn't work well as it repeats one contact for all the labels on each page, so you get a page of labels for John Doe, a page of labels for Janet Scofield, a page of labels for Mom, etc. Not very useful for mailings.

Unfortunately, you are limiting yourself by not becoming more familiar with the tools. You don't want all the the address in your main account's AddressBook, but you don't want them separate either. Having a separate account is no big deal, easy to get in and out of. Then again, I don't believe that putting rarely used names in your main account's AddressBook is a big deal either, so you have lots of options. In the case of using your main account, create a Group for your Personal contacts and drag all those contects into it prior to adding the special ones. Then create a Group for your special contacts and use it when doing the labels. When not makinig labels, keep the Personal Group selected and all displays and searches will ignore any names in the Special Group.

Used properly, AddressBook will make labels for mailing just as you desire. You apparently were using the mode for printing return address labels.

Jerry

It is easy to set up a Group in Address Book and later select all the contacts and delete them, if you really want.

Peter

Jerry:

Yes - I see I misunderstood how you were printing the labels, and I had forgotten that when you print directly from the address book you can print a wide variety of label forms. That certainly works well for regular mailings (in fact I used that last year for the family holiday mailing), however it still isn't ideal for my situation. I have no need for 50-100 temporary addresses in my address book (syncing back and forth to various other iOS devices as well) for people that I'm only mailing once and will then have to turn around and delete. It my situation is actually less effort to type the addresses directly into a word processor as you do not need to jump between fields, you can save the file with the other project files, and be done with it. In any case, having the Avery template for Pages works adequately for now. It would be nice if Pages had a label printing system similar to the AddressBook (which is similar to what Word has), but it's not a major issue...

Thanks for your help.

- McCArch

Warren: looking at other threads out there it doesn't appear that you can print the spouse/partner/friend field. One poster suggested using Avery DesignPro for Mac, which merges with your AddressBook, and allows you to select which fields to include. The only caveat is that it doesn't show it working with Lion (os 10.7). You can download it here:

http://www.avery.com/avery/en_us/Templates-%26-Software/Avery-DesignPro-for-Mac. htm?N=0&refchannel=c042fd03ab30a110VgnVCM1000002118140aRCRD

Hope this helps.

-McCArch

McCArch,

The situation you discribe calls for doing the printing from Numbers, in my opinion. Set it up once, use the template whenever you need it. No constraints on content as with AddressBook. But, it's tedious to set up the first time.

Jerry

Avery Design Pro works very well on Lion. I use it to create custom labels for all kinds of stuff and it prints beautifully on my HP 6500.

As a sidenote, let me add that while Pages and Word are great word processors, labels are a more specialized application. I prefer to use tools that work best at a particular job, like Design Pro for labels, and PrintShop for business cards, CD cases, and greeting cards. I think suites like Office suffer from feature bloat taking the Swiss Army knife approach.

This saved me a ton of work. Thanks!