Each year we send out Christmas Cards to some people in our mailing list. We check Vistaprints, Shutterfly, Smugmug, Walgreens and others for who has the best price. I like to pick a template that has mostly pictures, 3-4 pics minimum. This year Shutterfly won, they had a 30% discount and free shipping. Uploading the pictures was pretty easy and doing the layout took an hour to decide which ones worked best in which design. I found that uploading 12-15 pictures with both Black&White and Color allowed for different combinations for the cards. We decided on two 4x8" flat designs and randomly sent them out. We also found another coupon code for 5 folding ones and used those as the extra special cards for parents and sisters.
The cards arrived! They said allow up to 3 weeks, they were here in 4 days. Next step was mailing them out. We keep most of our address book in Outlook 2007, which means we can mail out mailing labels. So let's see, how does that work again? Mail Merge looked easy, and it was, once I did a little research.
So I have Outlook 2007, Word 2007 and Avery 5160 mailing labels. This is how I did my labels:
1) Organize your contacts so you can filter them. You need a way to define which people are going to get mailing labels, I used a field called User Defined 2 in each contact I wanted a label and added the word "xmas" into that field.
2) Address names - well, we all know single people don't like to be called The Mullen Family and married people don't like to get a card addressed to one spouse or the other, so you need to spend a little time getting names write on the mailing label before you print them. I like to use User Defined 1 field and type in Mr. & Mrs. Chris Schwalbach or Miss Maura Mullen or Mrs. Rosemary Mullen.
3) You need the mailing labels. I like Avery 5160's, they have 30 on each page and work great for most 3 line labels.
4) Don't print labels on the first try! It's best to use paper to do a trial run first.
5) If you have Word 2007, click Mailings tab, click Start Mail Merge, click STEP BY STEP mail merge wizard.
6) Wizard Step 1. Select Document Type. Choose labels.
7) Wizard Step 2. Select layout. Choose Label Options, Avery 5160.
8) Wizard Step 3. Select Recipients. Select from Outlook Contacts. Choose from Contacts folder, Filter, Field User Defined 2 is not blank. This is an option in the drop down, you don't have to type is not equal to "" or anything like that. Click ok. Click Next.
9) Wizard Step 4. Choose Address Block, Choose Match Fields button. Choose User Defined 1 in the First Name drop down. Choose Not Matched (you already put last name in the User Defined 1. I also usually choose Company and say Not Matched. The rest of the address fields should already be matched correctly.
10) Now the tricky part, you have to click on the UPDATE ALL LABELS button or you are going to get just one label on the sheet. Your labels should have «Next Record»«AddressBlock» in all but the first label. You can't just type this in, you have to use the button.
11) Wizard Step 5 - Preview your labels. You can preview and edit, but if you change have more than one page, editting gets reset each time you switch pages. Didn't figure that out, I just went back to Outlook and fixed them if I needed to.
12) Wizard Step 6. Complete the Merge. Click print. Again, you should print to paper first, then to labels.
We could have used 75, we purchased 70.
Done!
