TLC Tips of the Week:                          from Helen Olberg

This week’s tip applies to Microsoft Word. It was donated by Roi Thorpe in the Teaching and Learning Center. It has to do with printing multiple envelopes.

 

Normally, when you create an envelope in Microsoft Word, you click the menu items Tools, Letters and Mailings, Envelopes and Labels. Word will extract the address from your document (if you’ve typed one), and place it into the Delivery Address portion of the dialog box. When you finish setting the way you want the envelope to look and the envelope size, you click ‘Add to Document’ to print it later or ‘Print’ to print it now. When you do decide to print it, the printer will wait for you to feed the envelope manually before it prints.

 

This works fine if you have only one envelope to print.

 

It’s a little laborious, though, when you have more than one envelope to print, particularly when the printer is across the room or in another room. Microsoft’s answer is to use mail merge to create the multiple envelopes. Here’s an alternative way to put all your envelopes into one document and print all of them at once.

 

The objective is to get all your envelopes into one document, and then send them to the printer. Putting in the first envelope is the same as before (see 1-4 below). Unfortunately, when you choose Envelopes and Labels again, Word changes the first envelope. Here’s how to get around the problem:

 

  1. Choose Envelopes and Labels from the Letters and mailings item under the Tools menu.
  2. Make sure that the Envelop tab is selected.
  3. Using the controls in the dialog box, specify how your envelope should look. This should include the Delivery address if you choose to have Word generate the Delivery point barcode (under Options… in this window).
  4. When finished, click on the Add to Document button.
  5. Click the menu Insert Break and choose the Next Page section break. Click OK.
  6. Press Ctrl Home to position the insertion point above the section break.
  7. Repeat steps 1 through 3 for the next envelope.
  8. When finished, click on the Change Document button.
  9. Repeat steps 5 through 8 for each additional envelope.

 

When all your envelopes have been added, the file will can be printed as necessary.

 

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