Create Mailing Labels in Word 2003 With Mail Merge
You can use Mail Merge in Word 2003 to create mailing labels for a database full of customers.
Open Word 2003 and click on Tools \ Letters and Mailings \ Mail Merge…
In the Mail Merge menu on the right under Select document type, select Labels. Then click Next: Starting document.
From step 2 Click on Label options…
This will bring up a menu allowing you to select the brand and style of the labels you want to print. Here I am using Avery 4013 on a Dot Matrix printer. Of course you will want to select what you have, Avery is the most popular in business from my experience. If you have oddball labels you can always choose custom settings as well. When your done with the label options click OK.
Now you are going to want to choose your data source. Under Use an Existing List; click on Browse… Use Explorer to find the data source you want to use and double click it. (Creating a data source will be covered in another how to).
You will click on a confirmation screen verifying your data source (I used an Excel spread sheet that I had imported from Access) and get to Mail Merge Recipients window. Here you can change the order of your information, delete certain users, and validate information. Since I know the data source is what I want I chose Select All. Now hit OK.
Ok, we’re almost complete, just a couple more steps. Click on Next: Arrange your labels.
Here Click on More items…
Now we can choose the order of the data we want presented on the labels we are creating. Just double click on each field you want to include.
Now if you look over at your document you will notice these fields are being added to your labels. You can edit them by highlighting the field and moving it to where you want. For instance on this label I would want the First Name before the Last Name.
Now over on the Mail Merge menu bar you will want to select the “update all labels” button. This will populate each label with the fields from the fist label. Then click on Next: Preview your labels.
Your document screen will look similar to this.
Now, on the mail merge menu you can click through the Recipients by clicking the back or forward arrows. If you doing hundreds of labels … I would just spot check them. If you’re satisfied with how they look let’s move to step 6 and complete the merge.
The Merge is complete! Make sure your labels are set up in the printer and hit Print…
You will be presented with the print select screen. Choose all, or a specific number to print. You will get a different record for each contact from your data source on each label.
Daily Email Updates
You can get our how-to articles in your inbox each day for free. Just enter your name and email below:
i tried to do a mail merge in word i went threw all the steps, brought the file from excel, but nothing shows up in the address label fieds, is there something i should do first in excel, like save the file a certain, way.
Steven,
You do not have to save the Excel file in any way other than a .xls. Have you double checked the step…
“Now if you look over at your document you will notice these fields are being added to your labels. You can edit them by highlighting the field and moving it to where you want. For instance on this label I would want the First Name before the Last Name. ”
Also, are you using Office 2003?
This was helpful info, thanks. Does anyone know how to keep the merged information from looping? For example – if my spread sheet reads 1-20 in column A (as if the number were a name) and I merge it to labels with eight per page, I get 20 pages of labels instead of just 20 labels. They print out 1-8 on the first page, then 2-9, 3-10 and so on …. the info keeps looping. I can not for the life of me figure out what’s going on! Please help!
I followed these steps but at the merge to
printer stage after I had selected ‘all’ and then the print dialogue box came up (with the default ‘all’ selected)and clicked ‘print’ only page 1 of the labels printed.
The only way I could get all the pages to printed was to select the page range option e.g. 1-57. I had to calculate this by dividing the number of records in the excel file by the number of labels on the sheet.
Why is this? It doesn’t happen with any other multipage document when I print.
To whom it may concern: I just wanted to say thank you for such a great tutorial this is. I learn so much from it.
Thank you
Maria
Thanks, helped me out of a jam.
This was the BEST site for figuring this out! Thanks so much for your help
In the old version of word you used to be able to click a button that took out blank fields – I can’t see that this an option any longer – is that the case??
This was extremely helpful. I know just where to go when I need further help. I will pass this along to my fellow co-workers.
this was way more helpful than work or excel. THANKS!
Okay, this was SO helpful!
Thank you!
I found this super helpful but was wondering if there was a way to make it so that the mail merge would atuomatically update when I make changes to the excel spread sheet so that i don’t have to remerge it every time.
@erika: Yes, there is a way to do that.
When you get to the “Compleate the Merge” section of the wizard just save the Word document and every time you open the document, it will read the entries from the Excel file and put them in the document.
Note: Don’t select the “Edit Individual Labels” link first though as that will just give you a static document that won’t update.
help! i have successfully done a label mail merge and when i look at the print preview it looks all ok but when it prints the labels dont line up correctly and i have checked the dimensions and margins etc. what can i do?? if someone could help asap that would be fab! thank you
I have tried EVERYTHING! I do everything right until it comes time to select ‘update labels’, and I cannot select it! It is a grey ‘dead’ button. What am I doing wrong? Using vista. THX
I just installed Word, Excell 2007; I have used the 2003 version for all the years past. I have a lot of data base set up in Excell 2003 – I know how to do mail merge from this file to Word; however, what are the commands that I use in Word 2007 to complete the mail merge JUST FOR LABELS, not mass mailing of letters, just LABELS?
Thank you!!
@laura: If you have selected the right labels in the “Label Options” dialog and it still doesn’t work you could try selecting the “New Label” button in that dialog and adjest the settings a little bit to match how off the labels are printed.
@Shirley Phillip: If you want to do the same thing this article shows how to do for Word 2003 then it’s the same as this article shows except for the first step. For Word 2007 the first step is Mailings Tab -> Start Mail Merge Button -> Step By Step Mail Merge Wizard.
I am going through all of the steps but when I get to:
Now over on the Mail Merge menu bar you will want to select the “update all labels” button.
I get an error and Word closes down. I have tried to do it on my other computer as well and it does the same thing. Do you know what would be wrong???
I have done exactly what is said above; but after printing several pages, I found out that names are repeated randomly. Here is what happened, I have 199 names with addresses in excel sheet and I’ve selected 14 labels – 2 columns in one sheet so I should have 15 sheets only for 199 names but I’ve got 199 sheets too in full 14 labels each sheet has been filled-in.
I am confused, obviously all names are repeated as it appeared starts from second page one name’s repeated and so on… please help!!!
Jerry
Have a problem, hope you can help.
Template/main document is in MS Word 2003 format. Source data is in MS Excel 2003 format. Am trying to merge into a document that contains English, Arabic, Chinese and Thai. Only problem is with Arabic. The merge seems to convert the data leaving me with a front to back statement. E.g. on the spreadsheet, the data can be ABC1234 but on the merged document the data reads 4321CBA. Have tried swithching source to text, another MS Word document but seem to get the same result.
Appreciate any help/comments – thanks in advance.
I’m having the same exact problem as Jerry who posted on 1/4, and I’ve spent hours trying to correct with no success. Every label starts a new page so there are as many pages as there are records in the file. Each page has a full sheet of labels, starting with which record is the first record assigned to that page. I’m pulling my hair out over this.
Great help, confirmed the little I knew and filled in the blanks – extremely helpful.
Hello Paul! my problem on repeated label as posted above has been resolved. Try using other method in MsWord.
If you are still on this problem please let me know.
Jerry
Thank you, Jerry. I kept cancelling my wizard because I didn’t want to merge to printer without verifying that the file was right, but apparently that was the missing piece. I still am stubborn about doing it my way, so I do a Merge to New Document from the MailMerge toolbar instead, and that also fixes the problem.
I used this and it worked like a dream but created only one page of labels when I should get 23 or so, it’s 300 some names. I made sure all the names were selected in my data source. I went back and carefully did it again. What am I missing? By the way, this is a one minute deal on Office 98 on a mac, but on PC I’ve spent hours and been though tons of websites that don’t help a darned bit to figure out how to get the address block in the right order on the label. So thanks for that.
Heahter
This was the only one that I found worked. Thank you!
I’m glad that hours of maniacal renderings over this (and the subsequent hair loss) by a number of us has helped others. Heather, it’s a one-minute deal in Windows 98, also, and goes bad in XP. The MS people keep trying to dumb things down for the masses only to screw up royally what used to work. For the missing labels, did you try using the little arrows on the MailMerge bar to page over?
I am following all the instructions I can find and it seems to work well, but, following replicate addresses, it has worked on one page only. How can I get it to include enough pages for all of the name in my address list?
Please help.
Allen
Fiona –
I was trying to use the ADDRESS BLOCK capability and ran into the second address line problem. I wasted hours searching the web for an answer. If you don’t use address block and just use INSERT all of the fields then I did not run into the problem. I don’t know if there is a capability to modify ADDRESS BLOCK so you can suppress the blank lines.
Darcy
Jerry,
Thanks the merge to new document function corrected a single page problem that I was running into.
I just finished using “Create Mail labels in Word 2003 With Mail Merge”. After a few fits and starts (mostly due to user) I DID IT!!! I spent the better part of today trying to figure it out on my own but with no formal computer training I was getting nowhere. Thanks to you I did it. Please keep it up. Thank you