Panther’s Address Book: Printing mailing labels and envelopes

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
April 2nd, 2004 • 4:27 am

Panther’s Address Book application appears to have built-in support for printing mailing labels. If you go to the “Print” dialog and then to the “Style” menu on the right-hand side, you’ll find that, in addition to the default “Lists” option, which lets you print lists of addresses on a regular sheet of paper, you can select the “Mailing Labels” option, which then gives you an area with two panes: “Layout” and “Label”.

“Layout” appears to be intended for printing entire sheets of mailing labels, typically on special Avery sheets. But it also appears to let you print on an envelope. Inexplicably, however, there is no option to change the orientation of the address, and the only available orientation is the wrong way around! In the Preview area of the dialog, the envelope is oriented vertically, but the address is oriented horizontally. Oh dear. And there is no “Page Layout” dialog box in Address Book, so you really cannot change the orientation.

In other words, Address Book cannot be used to print on envelopes.

Then the “Label” pane lets you print individual address labels using a Dymo printer. This actually works (i.e. the orientation of the address matches the orientation of the address label on the Dymo). But for some reason you cannot include the fields “Title”, “Department”, or “Company” on the label! The only thing that Address Book lets you print is the name of the person and his/her mailing address itself. If you have an Address Book entry for a company that doesn’t include anything in the “First Name” and “Last Name” fields, you are out of luck. And if you want to include a person’s job title or company on the label, you are out of luck as well. (This applies to the “Layout” pane for Avery sheets as well, unfortunately.)

In other words, Address Book cannot be used to print address labels either.

What’s the point of including a half-finished feature, Apple?


2 Responses to “Panther’s Address Book: Printing mailing labels and envelopes”

  1. worldlabel says:

    try Worldlabel.com for PDF templates and use on you Mac OS

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    Not a practical option for people who just want to print addresses stored in their Address Book in Mac OS X.

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