Avery Labels on a Mac

This is taken from reviews.cnet.com:

"Can anyone tell me if Apple has finally incorporated mailing label templates (Avery Labels for example) into Pages 09? I know that you can print mailing labels from the Address Book but there is no flexibility in the Address Book labels."

There are many labeling solutions for the Mac, but many such as "Address Book" are limited in what they can do. Pages provides a very simple and elegant design interface that appeals to many Mac users and provides much potential for label production. Despite the lack of built-in templates for labels, users can take advantage of official templates available on the internet to create their own custom labels. Many companies such as Avery provide these templates for download in the ".doc" format for compatibility with Word, which also can be read by Pages.

Here's how users can incorporate the templates for use in Pages.

Download and open the template Go to Avery's website and find the template for the labels being used (Blank templates are preferred): http://www.avery.com/avery/en_us/Templates-&-Software/Templates. Open the layout in Pages after it's downloaded.

Remove graphical items Select and remove all graphics items if present (even subtle "outline" graphics), which may be incorrectly placed on multiple pages. To do this, select one graphic and press command-A to select all, then press delete. If multiple table cells appear when the graphic is initially selected, then users have not selected a graphic object and should try again. Do not delete the table, as this contains all the dimension information for the template.

Display the hidden table There will be a hidden table behind the graphics that should remain when they're deleted, which contains the appropriate dimensions for the desired labels. To display this table's boundaries, click somewhere on the first page and the table should highlight with resizing boxes around its outline. Then click again to select one cell and press command-A to select all table cells. With this done, open the inspector and under the "Table" section, in the "Cell Borders" area select a border style for the table from the drop-down menu. With this done the whole table should appear.

Set bottom margin (if applicable) If the table goes to multiple pages, increase the BOTTOM margin of the page until the table fits on one page. Do not change the top margin as this will offset the labels.

With the labels all on one page, users can add graphics and text as desired. Before printing the labels, however, users will want to remove the borders added upon displaying the hidden table, so they dont get printed to the labels. To do this, click outside of the table to ensure the cursor is not in "text entry" mode in the table. Then click the table and select a single cell and press command-A to highlight them all. Then using the inspector, set the border style to "None".

This process should work for most Avery templates in the ".doc" format.

Read more: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10329964-263.html#ixzz1Q9z81Qwb