Print your Outlook contacts as mailing labels

A friend asked if it's possible to print a subset of the addresses in her Microsoft Outlook contacts as mailing labels. You would think that such a basic operation would be a breeze for an industrial-strength personal-information manager like Outlook. You would think wrong.

The first bit of counter-intuitivity is that you use Microsoft Word, not Outlook. If you use Outlook's own mail-merge function by clicking Tools > Mail Merge, you get kicked into Word anyway. And every time I tried to run the resulting wizard, Word stalled in mid-process.

Instead, move the contacts whose addresses you want to print into a new folder in Outlook's contact list. With your new contact folder in place, click Tools > Letters and Mailings > Mail Merge in Word 2003 or the Mail Merge tab on Word 2007's ribbon.

In Word 2003, click the Labels button in the Mail Merge task pane and click Next. Now choose "Change document layout," click Label Options, select the layout you prefer, and click OK. Choose "Next: Select recipients" at the bottom of the task pane.

In Word 2007, click Start Merge > Labels, select your label layout, click OK, and choose Select Recipients. In both versions, choose "Select from Outlook contacts," click Choose Contacts Folder, and select the Outlook contact folder you just created.

In the Mail Merge Recipients dialog box, you can uncheck any names you want to remove from the list, sort the list by any category, or filter it. When the list looks the way you want it, click OK.

Modify, sort, and filter your list of Outlook contacts before you create your mailing labels.

(Credit: Microsoft)

In Word 2003, click "Next: Arrange your labels" and choose Address Block. In Word 2007, place the cursor in the first label and click Address Block. In both versions, make any necessary changes to the address layout and click OK. Now choose "Update all labels" in Word 2003 or Update Labels in Word 2007. The address block will appear in each label following "Next Record."

In Word 2003, click "Next: Preview your labels," and in Word 2007 click Preview Results. If you're happy with the look of your labels, click "Next: Complete the merge" in Word 2003 or Finish & Merge in Word 2007. In Word 2003, leave All selected and choose Print. In Word 2007, click Print Documents. You can also choose to edit the contacts before you print them.

A shorter method of printing the addresses is to choose Directory rather than Labels in the Mail Merge task pane of Word 2003 or Word 2007's Start Merge button. This places the addresses together in a single document, but you'll probably have choose the Edit option before you print to clean up the resulting formatting.

[lsteve]

Gosh, Microsoft makes it difficult to do anything regarding email? What a shock! Try using Chaos software(no kidding) for your PIM. Make Outlook just go away!

[dkfoote]

Very, very helpful. Thanks very much. I followed through your steps, and picked it up pretty quickly. While it all sounds so cumbersome, it's really not bad at all.

I'm having one problem, of course. When I build the document, I only get one page worth of addresses/labels. The one page holds 30 labels, which may vary with the label style/size. I'd like to print out labels for about 100 addresses, and I'd rather not build 3-4 separate documents. Can you offer any advice?

[JamieRC]

Not to be a total jerk, but this just doesn't work! I go all the way to the screen where you can edit your contacts by click on the boxes then I click ok, and the only thing that shows is Next record on each label. I've tried it on multiple computers. I spent almost 3 hours clicking and unclicking contacts to find this out. I was smarter the next time and did it to a smaller contact list, but still it does not work. What am I doing wrong? This is quite aggrevating!!!!

[hidekog]

I use Outlook and Word 2003. Last year I was able to produce holiday cards mailing labels; this year it doesn't work. After trying self-help I finally agreed to pay Microsoft $52 to get some help. Over the past week I have been bounced back and forth between Outlook people and Word people, and untold hours of my time have been consumed, but so far it doesn't work satisfactorily. I want to select contacts by Category (not so easily done); then move those contacts to a new file in Outlook (O.K., but they are removed from the regular Contacts file so you must be sure to restore them when you're through). I was advised by MS that I have to Export the selected contacts to my Desktop as a .csv file and don't attempt to do mail/merge in Outlook, only in Word. However, after all that's done, my labels come out in Word with last name first, "Smith John" rather than "John Smith." Does anyone have a solution to this? This seems like such an inelegant way to produce mailing labels, which should be a no-hassle task. Thanks in advance.

[Biz2Me--2008]

Here's how I did it in Word 2007:
1) Create a new folder under Contacts (I called mine Xmas)
2) Bring up your normal Contacts file and use the View by Category view.
3) Select all the contacts in the category you want to use.
4) Under Edit on the toolbar, select Copy to Folder. Select your new folder and the contacts you selected will be copied there.

Note that changes in one folder won't automatically show up in the other. However you can copy individual contact items to the new folder. Also, when you create the new contact folder, you have to right-click it, go to Properties, and check the box that says this is an e-mail contact folder. Otherwise it will never appear in the list of Outlook contact folders in MS Word. Hope this helps.

[82KZ1000P1]

Here's how I did it. Spent a couple of hours with Outlook 2007/Word 2007 with my wife saying she'll just write the Christmas card addresses out like she does ever year; I said, well, why don't you start at the Z's and work backwards while I'm trying to figure it out....she got the A's before I got a single one printed. And I use Outlook and Word all day at work.

[john9ten]

This saved my life. I was about to commit suicide over the inability to get Outllok's mail merge feature to work. I finally broke down and consulted the help function, and it magically brought me to this article rather than to Microsoft's unwieldy site. Within ten minutes of consulting your article, my holiday card list was printed and my life had new meaning! Thanks!