I love all that I can do with Microsoft Publisher, I probably use it a lot more than the average person. My Christmas cards have arrived and now it is time to address all 100 of them. This year, I decided to make my life easier and decided to utilize the fact that I already had all the addresses in Excel by making my own Address Labels via Mail Merge with Excel and Publisher.

Simplify Christmas Card Addressing With Publisher And Mail Merge

I use Avery 5160 Address Labels. The link says it is for laser printers, but it will work just fine on inkjet, but just remember that inkjet isn’t waterproof.

Publisher has the 5160 template built in, open up a blank template (or delete everything on it).

First, figure out what sort of background you would like. If you don’t want just a plain color, there are a lot of images built into Publisher or find one on a clipart site. I used a Gold Glitter Bokeh for mine.

Next, Add 3 text boxes – one for name and two for addresses.

Enter all of your addresses into Excel with 3 columns under the following Headers – Name, Address 1, Address 2

Go back to Publisher, in the “Mailings” Menu, select “Mail Merge” and then Select the Step-By-Step Wizard. The wizard will pop up to select the Excel file and worksheet. Drag and drop the Headers of the column into the corresponding text box.

Format each text box with the desired font and text size. Once everything is imported, I still went through and did some tweaks to the names that were too long for one line.  I selected the “Merge Into New Document” since I still wanted to make a few tweaks.

Before printing onto the labels, print onto some plain paper to make sure that the font and color choices are as expected and that you are happy with the end result.

For the print setup, make sure it says “Multiple Pages Per Sheet” otherwise you could end up with 30 of each address!

Once you have them how you want, simply print onto the labels and stick them on the envelope!

How many Christmas cards are you sending out this year? What would you put on your address labels?