As the festive season approaches we are busy thinking about all those extra jobs involved. Buying, wrapping, packing and sending Christmas greetings which includes addressing envelopes to family and friends.

Why not make your life easier by exporting your contacts from an Excel Spreadsheet into Word’s mail merge tool.

Follow the guide below to create a set of Labels ready to stick on to your Christmas Cards/Gifts.

(Label template will be based on Avery L7160 and Office 2011 for Mac. bit.ly/1dumvqo

I’ll assume you already have a list of contacts in a Spreadsheet in the below format. If not you can download an example Spreadsheet from here and replace the example data with your own contacts details. Save this in My documents or on your Desktop.

Firstly we need to prepare a Spreadsheet with all of the above data (you can edit the top row to fit your own needs)

When you have created your own Spreadsheet or downloaded the example version from above please open Microsoft Word and start a new blank word document.

Please go to the Tools Menu and click Mail Merge Manager on the drop down list.

Mail Merge Manager will allow you to import your data from an Excel workbook into the format needed to create labels.

Click Create New and select Labels…

Use the Label Products drop down menu and select “Avery A4 and A5 Sizes”

Please select L7160 – Addresses from the product number

You should be left with a word document that will have 21 labels with one line of text.

The next step is to tell Mail Merge Manager where to find the data.

Please select open data source.

Find your Excel Workbook that we prepared earlier, you possible saved this in My Documents or on your desktop.

You will then be asked to confirm a warning message, please click OK.

You should now be notified to select a workbook, please click OK.

Use the Insert Merge Field drop down menu to select the fields to be added to the label.

Try and create your layout to look like the screen shot below. When you are happy with the layout please click OK to move on to the next stage.

You should be left with a word document that has fields ready for the data from the Excel Work book.

Go to 5. Preview Results (<<>> ABC to preview data from work book)

You should now be able to see a preview of your labels in a document.

If your labels look correct you can now complete the Merge by sending all of the data to a new document.

You should now have an A4 sheet with 21 Labels. (If you have more than 21 addresses the labels will go over multiple pages.)

You can save this document and print this every year adding or editing addresses which can save a lot of time.