Print labels from Excel or Numbers on a Mac

1. Mailings › Start Mail Merge › Labels. In Label Options, choose the label supplier and the product number on your pack, such as Avery 5160, and click OK.
2. File › Save. Microsoft’s Mac instructions save the label document before connecting any data.
3. Mailings › Select Recipients. Choose to use an existing list, then pick your Excel workbook.
4. Mailings › Insert Merge Field. Add the fields to the first label, typing the spaces, commas and line breaks between them, and format that label.
5. Mailings › Update Labels. This copies the first label’s layout into every other label on the sheet. Skip it and only the first label on each sheet is filled.
6. Mailings › Preview Results, then Finish & Merge. Choose Print Documents, or Edit Individual Documents to check the merged sheets first and print them with File › Print.

Microsoft’s Print labels for your mailing list gives the Mac procedure in 13 steps, against 7 on Windows. The mail merge labels guide has the full procedure for both, and the fixes for labels that repeat, skip or print one per page.

Microsoft’s own Windows instructions open the wizard’s task pane: Mailings › Start Mail Merge › Step-by-Step Mail Merge Wizard, so a tutorial written that way stops matching a Mac at its first step. There is no such pane in Word for Mac. Follow the ribbon buttons instead; the underlying steps are the same. Guides written for Word 2008 describe a third arrangement, the Mail Merge Manager, which current versions do not have.

Word reads the value Excel stores, not what the cell displays. Microsoft’s troubleshooting article shows 50% merging as .5, $12.50 as 12.5 and a postal code losing its leading zero. Its first fix, a DDE connection, is set up through Windows’ File › Options and the wizard, so it is not open to you on a Mac. The fix that works on both is its second one: format the ZIP column as Text in Excel before you type the codes. More on that in ZIP codes that keep their zeros.

Word for Mac runs inside the macOS sandbox. Microsoft’s documentation for Office for Mac explains that sandboxed Office apps have no permission to open outside files until the user grants it, which is what a “Grant File Access” prompt is asking for. It is a permission request, not a sign that the merge is broken.

Then there is the question of whether you have desktop Word at all, and whether a mail merge earns its trouble even when you do. Word for the web cannot run a mail merge, so a Microsoft 365 plan that includes only the web apps, such as Business Basic, cannot either. Plans that include desktop Word can.

Keep one row per label and put plain column names in the first row: Name, Address, City, State, ZIP. Print Labels From Excel recognizes those and lays out a US address by itself, with city, state and ZIP code sharing the last line. A row with no apartment or company simply loses that line, so the label never shows a gap.

Copying is the quickest route when a Numbers document holds several tables, because you choose exactly the cells you want. Select them, press ⌘ C, come back to this page and press ⌘ V anywhere on it.

If you would rather merge in Word for Mac, Numbers can hand the list over: File › Export To › Excel writes a workbook, with a worksheet for each table or for each sheet, as you choose. File › Export To › CSV writes plain comma-separated text instead.

That suits letters, invitations and certificates, one per person; Apple’s guide notes that templates such as Party Invitation and Technical Certificate come with merge fields already in them. A sheet of labels needs something different: a different record in each label on the same page. The Pages instructions do not describe a way to do that, such as the «Next Record» field Word adds when you click Update Labels.

For a sheet you fill in by hand, Avery publishes a blank Apple Pages template for each of its printable products: enter the product number in its template finder, download the Pages version and open it in Pages. That works for a handful of labels. For the same return address on every label, return address labels fills a sheet from one typed address, and for a list of any length the tool above does the layout.

Preview’s Scale to Fit resizes the page whichever of its two options you pick, Print Entire Image or Fill Entire Paper. This is the macOS equivalent of the “Fit to page” trap and it matters just as much: a few percent of rescaling walks the bottom row of labels off its die-cut. The PDF asks the viewer to print at actual size, but not every viewer honors that request, so check the setting anyway. Printing from Chrome instead, look for the same thing: scale at 100%, never fit to page.

Under Paper Handling, leave “Scale to fit paper size” unselected. Print US Letter layouts on Letter paper and A4 layouts on A4; in the tool, the A4 sheets are the L and J numbers. If your Mac’s default paper size is A4, an otherwise perfect Letter layout prints shifted, and the default is set in Printers & Scanners settings.

Print one page on plain paper first and hold it up against a real label sheet. Preview’s own zoom tells you nothing about physical scale, so the paper test is the only reliable check. The blank template in step 3 of the tool, also on each sheet’s page under templates, carries (on most sheets) a 1.000 in reference line you can measure with a ruler. If the test page is off, labels not lining up finds the cause.

On label stock, Avery’s advice for printing from Pages is to set the media type to a thicker option such as Label or Heavyweight, and Quality to Best.