Access 2010: The Missing Manual

The Label Wizard

If you have a table with address information (like customer homes, business locations, or suspected UFO sites), Access has another wizard to offer you. The Label wizard pulls address information out of any table you want and uses it to print handy mailing labels.

To make this work, you just need to buy a few sheets of label paper from your favorite office supply store. Label paper varies—some types pack the information in very tightly, so you can print out dozens of return addresses at once, while others use larger labels for putting the mailing address on a letter or package. But no matter what type of label paper you pick, it has a standard Avery number that tells Access everything it needs to know about the labels’ size, and how they’re arranged. You give Access the Avery number, and then it can create a report that puts the address information in the correct place. All you have to do is print, peel, and stick.

Note

If you have a database that stores information about people, then you may have thought about using Access reports to build form letters and other documents. Getting Access to cooperate isn’t all that easy. Instead, you’ll do better using a real word-processing program like Word. Word includes a mail merge feature that can extract data from an Access database, and then use it to generate any document you want.

To create a batch of labels, here’s what you need to do:

1. In the navigation pane, select the table with the address information.

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