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technical triumph

March 17th, 2007 by tree

This post will be interesting to people who get raw address lists and have to format labels, and who don’t want to either retype the data or cut and paste each address block one by one:I got a list of three hundred addresses for a postcard mailing. The list was in Word, one column. I’m sure there was a better way of doing this in Word alone, but I didn’t want to learn anything new, so I took my own experience in Word and Indesign and came up with a fairly quick way to do the labels.

  1. First, I downloaded the Avery Label Template in a PDF format and saved it to my desktop.
  2. I created a new document in Indesign.
  3. I imported the PDF into a Master Page in the Indesign document.
  4. I formatted the master page for three columns, no gutter, .5 inch top and bottom margins
  5. I went to the Word doc and copied the entire address list to the clipboard (ctrl-C)
  6. I pasted that list into a text box. Then I did a search and replace for all the paragraph tags, replacing them with forced line breaks. Then I did a search and replace to find all the double instances of forced line breaks and turned them back into one paragraph break. That way, each address block turned into ONE paragraph that could be formatted as a unit. This is essential!
  7. I created a new page that was based on the master, and I drew three text boxes. I copied the text in the first text box with the cleaned up code (see step six). Then I deleted that box.
  8. In the new page, I created three text boxes (for the three columns of the label template) and linked them together. (This is called threading the text boxes.) I pasted text into the first column, and the text flowed into all three, showing the little overset plus box that indicates there’s lots more text that needs to flow onto subsequent pages.
  9. I created four paragraph styles that control the amount of “space after” the end of the paragraph break. Some had a little, some had a lot of space after, and this is important because the addresses were of varying lengths.
  10. I continued to create new pages, copying and pasting text boxes into each page so that all the pages (10 in all, 30 labels per page) had three text boxes, and all those boxes were threaded together.
  11. Starting from page one, I applied paragraph styles to each paragraph, choosing the one that would add enough or as little space to correctly place the subsequent address. Each address block lined up at approximately the middle of the label. Yes, it is a bit time consuming to do this, but it’s faster than typing three hundred addresses.
  12. If you got this far, I’m surprised! I was excited that I could figure this out without a tutorial or any help from the Internet.
  13. Had the text been prepared in Excel originally, I would have done a simple mail merge with Word and Excel into a label template. But often, we are presented with raw text, and now I have a method for dealing with it.

6 Responses to “technical triumph”

  1. on 17 Mar 2007 at 10:21 pm   fez

    Wow.

  2. on 17 Mar 2007 at 11:47 pm   roger

    Dearest Tree, those directions read to me like a magic incantation, and I can make hide nor hair of none of it. Thank goodness there are people in this electronic society who know what they are doing - unfortunately, I’m not one of them.

    R

  3. on 18 Mar 2007 at 2:30 am   rosa

    Individual addresses that had to be entered for the first time? Why didn’t you use Access and then a mail merge with Word? Then you’d have the addresses already in a database for the next time, and have a word template to use again…and it’s way simpler.

  4. on 18 Mar 2007 at 3:14 am   tree

    Rosa, this was a word document GIVEN to us as such. I didn’t want to retype everything in Excel. I don’t use Access. This was the quickest way to take data from one format to another without typing. (See step 13: Had the text been prepared in Excel originally, I would have done a simple mail merge with Word and Excel into a label template.)

  5. on 18 Mar 2007 at 11:04 pm   msjilly

    Tree, you are so smart, it’s so cool you figured out how to fix your problems yourself.

    The deal with access is that you can’t use importing between excel, word and acess when there’s text with commas because access (like most database software) reads a comma as “go to the next cell” and will get you off track. You can’t fix this issue between excel and access with word, because it’s POS, but you can if you have something like lotus (it’s not really less POS, but it can get around the POSness of word in this case). You import from excel into lotus and change the saving format and then can import lotus into access.

    I like to use access, mainly because i know how, and in fact, I have a database for addresses and phone numbers and special dates as well as word documents to make labels and excel spreadsheets as a backup address and phone list.

  6. on 20 Mar 2007 at 12:58 am   roger

    “Why didn’t you use Access and then a mail merge with Word”
    “I would have done a simple mail merge with Word and Excel into a label template”
    “you can’t use importing between excel, word and acess when there’s text with commas because access (like most database software) reads a comma as “go to the next cell” and will get you off track”
    “Eye of newt, wing of bat, double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble.”
    All of the above make exactly the same amount of sense to me.
    R

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