Print labels from Excel — without Word

A row becomes a label; a column becomes something you can place on it. Splitting an address into separate columns for street, city, state and ZIP code gives you control over where the lines break, covered further in laying out an address list. An address typed into one cell with line breaks inside it does not, because it arrives as a single run of text.

Put plain headers in the first row: Name, Address, City, State, ZIP. Word turns those into merge field names, and this tool uses them to lay out the label for you. A merged title row sitting above the headers breaks both, since the first row is where each one expects to find the column names.

Avoid merged cells anywhere in the data range. A merged cell has no clean row-and-column position, so readers either skip it or return the value in the wrong place. Unmerge, and repeat the value down the column if it needs to appear more than once. Avoid blank rows mid-list too: in a Word merge a blank row becomes an empty label and pushes every label after it one position along the sheet. This tool skips rows with nothing to print.

Format ZIP codes as text before typing them, not after. Excel treats 02134 as the number 2134 and discards the leading zero, and changing the format afterwards will not bring it back; the value has to be re-entered. Select the column, set Format Cells to Text, then enter the codes. A custom format of 00000 only displays the zero while still storing a number underneath. That is enough for this tool, which prints what Excel displays, and not enough for a Word merge, which reads the stored number.

Start in Word with a blank document, not in Excel. These are the steps on Windows; Word for Mac uses the same Mailings ribbon.

1. On the Mailings tab, choose Start Mail Merge, then Labels. In Label Options, set Label vendors to Avery US Letter (Avery US and Avery A4/A5 number their products differently), find your product number, for example 5160 Address Labels, and click OK. Word turns the page into a table whose cells match the sheet. If the cell edges are invisible, turn on View Gridlines from the Table Layout tab.
2. Choose Select Recipients, then Use an Existing List, and browse to your .xlsx file. Pick the worksheet and leave First row of data contains column headers ticked if your sheet has a header row; that is what turns your columns into named merge fields. Edit Recipient List lets you filter or sort if you only want part of the list.
3. Build the first label only. Click into the top-left cell and use Insert Merge Field to place each field, typing the spaces, commas and line breaks yourself. Word inserts the field and nothing around it, so «First_Name» «Last_Name» needs the space typed in between.
4. Click Update Labels. This copies the first cell’s layout into every other cell and adds a «Next Record» field to each, which is what makes Word move through the list instead of repeating the first row. Skipping it is the most common reason a merge prints one correct label followed by twenty-nine copies of the same address.
5. Use Preview Results to step through the merged labels, particularly the longest addresses.
6. Choose Finish & Merge, then Edit Individual Documents, and merge All. Word produces a new document holding every page of labels, and that document is what you print, at 100% scale.

One detail worth knowing in advance: Word reads the value Excel stores, not the formatting you see, so ZIP codes with leading zeros can arrive stripped and currency loses its symbol. On Windows there is a way round it: tick “Confirm file format conversion on open” in File, Options, Advanced; then, when you select the workbook, tick Show all in the Confirm Data Source box and choose MS Excel Worksheets via DDE. DDE is not available on a Mac. The mail merge labels guide covers the other things that go wrong, from a label that repeats to a merge that prints one label per page.

Scaling by even one percent moves each row further from its die-cut than the one above it, so the top labels look fine and the bottom ones print across the gaps. The PDFs made here ask your PDF viewer to print at actual size, but not every viewer listens, so check the dialog.

Set printer margins to none where the driver offers it: a margin the printer adds shifts the whole sheet. Check the paper size matches the sheet, US Letter for Avery’s US numbers and A4 for the L and J numbers, because the same layout printed on the wrong paper comes out shifted.

Then print one page on plain paper and hold it against a real label sheet, up to a window if you need the light. That one check catches scaling, paper size and driver margins at once, for the price of a sheet of paper. Every sheet in the label template index has a blank template PDF with cut guides, most with a one-inch reference line, for exactly this, and labels not lining up walks through each cause if something is off.