Using Microsoft® Word To Design Your Labels

Microsoft’s official guidance for “Create and Print labels” in Microsoft Word, Applies To: Word 2016 Word 2013 Word 2010 Word 2007 Word Starter 2010

( We highly recommend our customers to take a look at MS’s official guidance before designing your own template)

Not many people know that within Microsoft® Word there is a simple labelling program which helps you to position the print. It is fairly basic but you can insert images and use all the Word formatting features for your text. Advanced users can set up variable fields to be filled later with data from lists or databases. The program works by displaying rectangular cells which represent the labels on the sheet (it’s not sophisticated enough to show circles).

The label printing option is under “tools” and then “letters and mailings” on the main toolbar. You can select a label layout under “Options” if you know the Avery® template number (choose Avery A4 and A5 sizes), or you can generate your own template by typing in the measurements. Once you have the template you need, we recommend that you enter some text into the window and select “New Document”; this will generate an A4 page displaying the cells.

Clearly, if you have a page with say 40 labels on it, you will not want to design the label 40 times! To avoid this we recommend that you ignore all the cells apart from the cell in the top left corner, design your label here first and then cell copy it into the rest of the page. The “cell copy” function is described below.

To generate more rows of text in a cell, simply place your curser at the end of a row and press “enter”. The best way to insert images into the cell is to highlight a row of text and then use the “insert” function. You can also centralise the text in a cell using the centralisation tool. To check how your design looks when printed, just print it onto plain paper and hold the printed sheet up to the light against a sheet of labels.

Once you have perfected the top left cell, then you can use “cell copy” to duplicate the content and position of your design into all the other cells on the page. Select the top left hand cell by positioning your curser on the left hand vertical border of the cell until it displays a bold diagonal black arrow. When you see the arrow, left click to select and then right click and choose “copy”. The cell is now copied to your clipboard. Move the curser to the top of a column and when you get a bold, black vertical arrow, left click to select the column, then right click and choose “cell paste”. The contents of your designed cell will copy into all the cells in that column.