Mailing Labels

This was written by Victoria A. Provost, Registrar of John Stark Regional High School.

There are a couple of ways you could do this & for my example I will say I am looking to make labels for my juniors.

On your start page, don't just click the grade #… instead type in the search command

Grade_Level=11

When your selection comes up, the search box should be highlighted by default, as seen below.

keeping the text highlighted, type in the search command

&Home_Room=Provost

substituting one of your teachers' names for "Provost"

Here at our high school, we don't use the home room field, but this could also be done by counselor

Guidance_Counselor

or

Team

or we often use our Advisories for distributing materials, so we created a custom field

Advisory_Room

Once you have your selected students narrowed down to that class, then you can use the group function

"Print Mailing Labels"

You would need to repeat this for each classroom or homeroom needed.

I found the issues we were having getting our mailing labels aligned correctly when we attempted to print straight from PS was related to an Adobe Reader page setup issue. I believe that by default, PDFs print w/ "Fit" or "Shrink to Fit" as the setting in Page Sizing & Handling. Thanks to one of the Q&A postings on the Pearson website, I discovered that if you switch your Page Sizing to "Actual Size" it prints beautifully. Once I set this as my option it has stayed that way. (Center Left of image below)

If you have someone who's familiar with using mail merge I think there's a faster way to accomplish this.

Export the data you need into an excel spreadsheet and then merge it into a Word Label Template.

On the start page you can either click on ALL or select a single grade if that's all that's needed. Either way, it will be simple to sort your selection in excel if you export the right fields,

First_Name

Last_Name

Mailing_Street

Mailing_City

Mailing_State

Mailing_Zip

Grade_Level

Home_Room OR Guidance_Counselor, etc (whatever field you're hoping to sort by)

You can do this by using either

List Students

or

Quick Export

found in the same group functions drop down menu.

If you select List Students, make sure you check off the Export Box so your list will display in excel.

Once you have your data in excel you can do a Custom Sort, found on the Data tab.

Sort by

Grade_Level

+ Home_Room

+ Last_Name

+ First_Name

Now when you merge all of your students into your Word Label template they should be sorted 1st by their grade, then by their homeroom.

Mail merge also gives you the option to filter your results so if you exported ALL grades, you could filter by just the grade you wanted to print, or just certain teachers.

You can also set up your label template so that each one starts with To the Parent/Guardian of:

This is how we do it, which is why I suggest using the individual fields for First & Last names, rather than LastFirst.