About this lesson
Learn tips for label margins and email merges.
Lesson versions
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Exercise files
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ Word documents from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Mail Merge Tips from Experience.docx14.1 KB Mail Merge Tips from Experience - Solution.docx
19.4 KB
Quick reference
Mail Merge Tips from Experience
Label margins and Email merges have pesky issues that are easily solved with just a few clicks.
When to use
If you use labels, you need to know how and why to fix the margins.
If you use Email merges often, there is a more efficient process that will save time and frustration.
Instructions
To fix the margins on a label document,
- Double Click the left ruler
(or go to Page Layout ribbon, Margins, Custom Margins) - Adjust the margin from .19 to .25
- Click IGNORE on the error message
- Happily print your labels knowing the text will stay inside the label cut line.
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- 00:04 I want to share a couple of tips with you that I have learned over the last 20 years
- 00:08 of doing mail merges with Microsoft Word and
- 00:11 basically the main thing is the labels.
- 00:13 When you mail merge to labels you're going to have a problem with your margins and
- 00:17 you also need to know that you're dealing with a grid layout here.
- 00:20 So first first of all,
- 00:21 I'm gonna show you what I mean when we're dealing with the grids.
- 00:23 So this is the results of my mail merge labelled it's the solution
- 00:27 file with the video set if you wanna open that up.
- 00:31 Whenever you click on the labels of final document, a brand new tool set comes up,
- 00:35 ribbon set.
- 00:36 Table Tools, and I have a Design and I have a Layout.
- 00:40 Well on the Design portion there is a button over here called Borders, and
- 00:44 I'm going to actually View Gridlines.
- 00:46 Now these gridlines will not print but
- 00:49 it allows me to actually see every single label on this screen, right?
- 00:54 Now notice right over here, is the left edge.
- 00:56 Now the default margin per label is 0.19.
- 01:02 And I'm here to tell you that that 0.19, this is a little,
- 01:06 I just inserted the line here to show you where the cut line's gonna happen.
- 01:12 0.19 is the cut line of the actual label okay.
- 01:16 So when you send your stickers through your printer, good luck.
- 01:23 And I hope that it's not slanted at all because then your letters
- 01:28 are going to be cut off on the cut line.
- 01:30 The goal is to correct that and make it a 0.25 margin.
- 01:34 Why isn't it the default?
- 01:36 I don't know.
- 01:37 Cuz whoever programmed it thinks that no one makes mistakes,
- 01:40 and labels never go through crooked, but they do.
- 01:43 So what we're gonna do is we're gonna click on the Layout ribbon,
- 01:46 then come right over here to our Margins.
- 01:48 I'm gonna come down here to Custom Margins.
- 01:51 And we're going to change, let's see if it will let me do that.
- 01:54 There we go, we're gonna change our left margin to 0.25.
- 01:57 Now you keep your eye right over here, okay?
- 02:01 And I'm gonna hit OK right down here, let me hit OK.
- 02:06 And you can see that it all shifted over a little.
- 02:09 Even this line came with it.
- 02:10 But anyway, I can get rid of that now.
- 02:13 So it shifted over just enough.
- 02:14 And now, that just gives you enough leeway so
- 02:17 if your sheet of labels goes through a little crooked, the 0.25 will fix it.
- 02:21 Okay, so that was the two tips I wanted to share with you,
- 02:24 fix your Margin to a quarter of an inch and
- 02:27 make sure that your Table Tools > Borders, so that you can view the gridlines.
- 02:32 So that you can see what's going on inside the labels.
- 02:35 All right, that's it.
- 02:36 Thank you so much.
- 02:38 Bye.
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