Printing Labels Using Mac Pages

You can easily create a simple labels template to print a list of addresses to labels in Pages. The list can come from text or a Number spreadsheet. You can also modify pre-made labels templates to work better.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to print labels with your Mac. 
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Now recently when I did a video in using the new Mail Merge feature in Pages several people were disappointed that you couldn't use this to print labels. The idea with Mail Merge is you're adding one name or address or other type of information per page but labels, of course, are several on a page. So to print labels it is a very different technique and something that you could have done all along. There's no special functionality needed. 
I should note before I begin though that if you want to just print labels from the addresses in your Contacts you don't need Pages at all. You can go to the Contacts app and select the addresses you want. Go to File, Print and then from there click Show Details and then you could choose Style, Mailing Labels. From here you can print as Labels even choosing from many different standard label types. 
But to do this from Pages first we want to start off with a list of names and addresses to go on the labels. Now this can come from a variety of sources. But let's say, as an example, that you have them in a Numbers spreadsheet. What I'm going to do here is combine all of these things into a real address. So I'm going to start a formula with equals = and then here I'm going to use each one of these things to create it. So I'm going to start with the Name. Then I'm going to do ampersand and then quote and then I'm going to use Option Return and then quote again. That puts a line feed afterwards. Let's do ampersand and then let's do the Street and then the same thing. Ampersand quote Option Return quote and then ampersand. Let's do the City. Ampersand quote and then a comma and a space quote and then ampersand and then the State. Ampersand again just a space and the quotes and the zip. The result of that will give us a nice looking address. Copy. Double click on the column title here and Paste. So the formula was pasted there and you can see nice addresses here. 
So now I should be able to Copy all of this and Paste it into my Pages document. So let's create the Pages document next. So let's first assume that you don't have any kind of template to work with. You just have your sheet of labels. You can either measure it or maybe you could figure out from how many there are exactly what the measurements of each label are. Let's assume that we have a sheet that is 3 labels across and 11 labels vertically. I'm going to go in Pages here and go to File and Convert to Page Layout. It will get rid of the Body Text and allow us to do whatever we want here with text boxes. Let's go to View and then Show Rulers and View and Show Layout. So now we can see everything here. We could go to Format and under Page turn off Show Header and Footer. 
So we have none of that. Now we can use the rulers to create guides.Since we know there are 3 across and maybe goes edge to edge, there are no margins on these labels,  I can drag from the left side here and place this line where it should go which is about .83 right there and 5.66. That divides the page up into three even portions just using math there to divide 8½ by 3.  Now we know vertically, since there are 11 of them and they are 11 inches, that they are 1 inch labels. So we can add these lines here at one inch intervals all the way down the page. So there we go. We have our labels.
Let's create a text box and take this text box and place it here in the first label. Now depending upon your printer they have margins you have to pay attention to. Like a good laser printer may have nothing or maybe just a quarter of an inch here. But that's okay. You don't want the actual addresses to go up to the edge of the label anyway. So we'll take this and we'll put this in the center here. Let's type in a sample address like that and get it to look like what we want. Maybe you want it to be left justified like that. Maybe we want to change the Text here and make it a different style. Let's make it a little bit bigger. Make it Bold so it stands out there. Let's make sure it is big enough to contain those three lines and really not much more. Now that we have that we want to duplicate this text box in the other boxes. I'm going to use the Option key and click and drag with the Option and it will drag a copy of that. See how the guides there let me line it up pretty easily. I'll do it again and you can spend all the time you want trying to get it perfect. 
Now we can Shift Click to select all 3 of these and Option drag down and do the same thing here. Option drag again. Maybe after we have a few of them you could drag around all of them. Option Click and you can see how quick and easy it is to duplicate these. Great. So the problem is now each one of these is an individual text box. We would have to Copy each address and then Paste it in and then do it for all of them. But, we can link these text boxes and do it more easily.
So, to link a text box, see this round dot up here. I'm going to select it. Click that and that will create the beginning of a linked list of text boxes. Green is the color that indicates the Set and  this is number 1. Let's select this one down here. I'll Click and it changes to red. Another set. But if we click again we can switch to green. Now it is going to merge the threads. So now we go here. Click. Green. You can see it is not going to warn us after that first time so it is a lot quicker. Now we can go through and merge them all. So now we have 18 linked text boxes. If I select something in here and do Command A to select All notice that it selects everything there. I can Delete and I can actually type 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. You can see how it goes box to box like that. So now I can go back here. Select All of these cells. Copy. Then go to Pages and Command V to Paste and look what it does. It Pastes them all in. Now it is using the Style from Numbers. Let me Undo and instead go Edit, Paste & Match Style. Now it will use the Style that we had for our Pages document. If I were to go in here and select All you could see all the text is selected. So I can adjust the size there like that. Now one of the nice things about doing this in Numbers here with the formulas that use, remember we did Option Return instead of Return, that creates a line break that more closely links together the group. So, the return between each one of these and the return from here to here are different. That's why when we shrink it down it attempts to keep the address together. Now we've shrunk it down enough so that two addresses can fit on one label. That's why that happened. But, in general, even though there is room for another line it is not going to. You can even see here the blue indicator here showing it is a special type of return there as opposed to a paragraph there. 
Now we can adjust these. We can even change things like Center them all like that. Note that if things are a little off center now there's a lot we can do. For instance, let me click outside of any of these boxes. So I'm not selecting text anymore. Do Command A and I've selected all the text boxes rather than the text inside them. Now if I use the Down Arrow or Drag I can move all of them at once. So maybe I could recenter these, like that. If I need to make them larger then dragging one box isn't going to do it. But, I can go to Format, Arrange, and notice how the height is .77. If I increase that or decrease that or change it using a manual number it does it for all of those. The same thing for the width as well. So you could change the width to make it a little bit wider and they all change. Select them all again here and use the left arrow, right arrow to move back and forth all together. So there's a lot you can do. If things don't line up right you can always add an extra return or you can edit something just to make it just right. 
Now a lot of times you do have a template that you can work from. You don't start from scratch. For instance, go to one of the largest makers of label sheets and you can go to the Templates page here. You can enter in the number that comes on the box there and notice that one of the templates usually included is Pages. So I can Click there and download the template. In this case I get a template that looks like this. I'll open it up and you can see how it looks a lot like what we created except that things aren't linked together. So if I were to go into Numbers now and Copy this column here. Go back into here and Paste you could see it only pastes in that very first text box here.  So I'm going to have to set things up so I could link the boxes to each other. So I'll set this one up as Green and I'll add for each one of these. So you can see I've linked them all. Let's select all the text again and Delete. Now I'll Paste them back in and you could see how all the addresses I have filled in here really nicely. Let's say I had twice as many addresses. I could paste them in there and you could see how this indicates there is more than what fit on this page. So instead of creating a second page a handy thing to do is just print this first page and then select starting here, and I'm going to Shift Click to select here and then Delete. You've deleted all of those and these fill in here. I've got one more than I need. I'm going to forward arrow to the next one and then hit Delete there. So now I can print the second sheet to finish my printing.
Notice also now you can change the style to what you want. So you can change, you know, the font to something else. You could change the style. Make it a little bit bigger. You can Center it. You can do whatever you want here and do everything else we talked about like I do Command A to select All. I could go to Format, Arrange. Change the height a little bit. Change the width like that. I can reselect them all again and maybe use the left arrow key a bunch of times there. Maybe recenter it. Down arrow. So you can adjust everything in here to get it to look like what you want. Then go ahead and print using the pre-made template that you've modified to make it easier to actually have these addresses put in here. 
Notice here if I select All and Copy and then go to another document, let's say a Pages document, and I paste them all in you can see what I get here. It's basically three lines per address in this case. It doesn't have to be three. You can generate this anyway that you want. It doesn't have to come from Numbers. You can just type this out if you like. As a matter of fact you can have a line break between each one just to make it easier to see and just make sure that you include that extra line in here. You know if I Paste this you could see it's a bit of a mess. But if I select all of these text boxes and go and make all of these text boxes tall enough you could see it includes that extra line in there now. It doesn't matter if it overflows a little bit to the next label because there's nothing there to print. So now it works out nicely even though I'm starting with a document that has an extra break in there. 
So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 8 Responses to “Printing Labels Using Mac Pages”

nick

8 months ago

Great tutorial Gary. I did a quick test with Pages to see if I could select multiple text boxes and link them all at once, but it doesn't allow it. Any idea why that's not a feature? It would sure make it easier to link multiple text boxes at once. Thx

Gary Rosenzweig

nick: I don't see any reason why it should work that way. Perhaps just a bug or maybe something to be improved at a later time.

Rosemary

tried printing labels using the Contacts app and then File, Print, Details, Style and Mailing Labels. Worked great but I really want the addresses centered in the label box instead of left justified. Is there any way that I can do this?

Rosemary: How about using the method in this video?

Carol

5 months ago

For the life of me I can't make the formula work in Numbers. I have read and re-read your instructions and the option return isn't putting a line in

Carol: Are you using an older version of Numbers or macOS? Is the only problem you are having the Option+Return?

Kassandra

How can I do this with tent cards that need to have the same record - double-sided with one name upside down?
Using Avery 5913 - Downloaded from their website
I can not seem to choose 2 without one of the names going into the other box.

Kassandra: Not sure what that template has going on, but you can just keep working with it. Make adjustments. Add your own text boxes if you need to.

Printing Labels Using Mac Pages

Comments: 8 Responses to “Printing Labels Using Mac Pages”

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