How to Make Address Labels With Apple Address Book

No need to do a mail merge with a huge spreadsheet. Apple's Address Book can make labels in no time flat. You can select all the addresses or just a group to print. Address Book allows you to print to the standard label sizes, change fonts and colors. This is, however, not as full featured as other products, but it gets the job done quickly with a very small learning curve. Here are the easy steps.

Things You'll Need

• Apple Running Mac OS 10.4+
• Address Book (included with Mac OS X)
• Addresses
• Sticky Address Label Sheets
• Printer

Instructions

1. 

   Launch Apple's Address Book by clicking on its icon in the Dock or going to the Applications folder and locating it there.

2. Enter your addresses if you don't have any. Be sure to put as much detail as you can. Address Book will not print an entry if there are no addresses.

3. 

   Create a group. Click the plus-sign button on the bottom left of the Address Book screen below "Group."

4. 

   Type in a name for your group.

5. 

   Add people to this new group by clicking and dragging them from the "Name" column into the Group you just created. For example, if you're printing Address Labels for a party invitation you're sending, add all the invitees to this group.

6. 

   Select the Group you just created.

7. 

   Go to File > Print or hit the keyboard shortcut CMD-P to bring up the print window.

8. 

   Click the down-arrow button next to the printer name if you don't have all the options displayed.

9. 

   Select "Mailing Labels" from the "Style" drop-down box. You can also make envelopes with your return address, a mini address book and a list of all the contacts you selected.

10. 

    Select the address you want printed in the "Addresses" drop-down box. If you've added more than one address (work and home) you can specify which address will be printed.

11. 

    Choose the order in which the labels will be printed. One reason to print in "Postal Code order" is for a bulk mailing where the post office requires the pieces be in order--otherwise "Alphabetical order" should do the trick.

12. 

    Click the check box next to Company and Country if you wish to print that information on the address labels as well.

13. 

    Hit the box next to "Color" to change the color of your text.

14. 

    Move the slider up and down and click in the circle to select the color you want.

15. 

    Click on "Set" next to "Font: " to change the font.

16. 

    Select the font size, typeface and font family in the font box that pops up. You can close it when you're done.

17. 

    Click the "Layout" button to change the layout of the address label sheets if necessary.

18. Hit the "Print" button in the lower right corner when you're done.