Address labels from Excel

Set the spreadsheet up first

Put each part of the address in its own spreadsheet column — that one decision determines whether the rest goes smoothly. Keep each part separate: name, street, second street line if you use one, then city, state or county, and postcode. Do not put the whole address in one cell with line breaks inside it — that reads back as a single run of text and you lose control over where the lines fall.

Give the first row plain headers. "Name", "Address", "City", "Postcode" is enough. The tool reads that row to label the columns in the mapping step, and clear headers make the mapping obvious rather than a guessing game about which column is which.

City, state and postcode are conventionally printed on one line. You can either combine them in the spreadsheet with a formula, or map them to separate label lines and accept a taller layout. On a 30-per-sheet format the combined version reads better; on a taller label there is room either way.

Choosing a format

Avery 5160 is the default for domestic post: thirty per sheet, one inch by two and five-eighths, three comfortable lines. If your list has long company names or international addresses, that width starts to bite and the tool shrinks the text to fit. When that happens, move up.

Avery 5161 keeps the same one-inch height but doubles the width to four inches, which absorbs long organisation names without shrinking. The taller 5162 is four inches wide and a third deeper again, which is the one to pick when you need four or five lines, or larger type for readability.

Getting the print right

Set the print dialog to actual size. "Fit to page" and "Shrink oversized pages" both rescale by a percent or two — invisible on plain paper, and fatal on labels, because the error accumulates down the sheet until the bottom row prints across the die-cut gaps.

Run one page on plain paper and hold it against a real label sheet before you commit. If it lines up, the rest of the run will too. You can also download a blank template from any of the Avery formats and use that as the alignment check.