[Solved] Poor Alignment, Avery 8162 labels

[SteveKMFT]

California, USA. I'm using Avery 8162 White Mailing Labels (1 1/3" x 4") for Inkjet printer to caption photos in a photo album. When I printed a sheet of labels (HP Photosmart C3180) they came out misaligned. The Avery sheets of labels are 7 rows by 2 columns. After some searching I determined that the OpenOffice template for that product is inexplicably 8x2!?

The basic problem is how to even format one sheet of labels correctly. (I have 11 documents of a single sheet of 8x2 labels since I generated them before realizing the headache they were going to be to print). [Also couldn't figure out how to do multiple pages].

In addition to the wrong number of rows, the right-hand column prints exactly on the center line of the Avery sheet, so it cuts off text on the right-hand column of labels. (I did indent all text on the r. hand column since the formatting on individual labels isn't crucial).

Furthermore the labels don't even align correctly on the horizontal. The top margin (header?) isn't big enough on the template (0.51"), I tried correcting it (0.66") but the labels below still won't come out correctly. The text for the first row of labels lands above the cut, and all the subsequent labels are not printed on their correct rows, with lines of text over-lapping two different labels. Does anyone know a good set of custom numbers to get the OpenOffice 8162 template to actually match the Avery product?

Note: I did not do a Mail Merge of data, because most of the labels are different.

Q2: Is there any way to re-format an existing document (i.e. the 8x2 labels into a correct 7x2 format, when I know what those numbers are?) Or do I have to cut and paste 163 labels?

Note 2: I am planning to use these labels for an actual mailing project, but it would still be great to get the hang of correctly printing mailing labels...

[acknak]

Greetings and welcome to the community forum!

Sounds like you have several problems to work through. I'm not sure how to prioritize; if I was in this position, I'd first get the data out of the labels and into some more manageable format. Unfortunately, I don't see an easy way to do that.

... After some searching I determined that the OpenOffice template for that product is inexplicably 8x2!?

I'm not sure where you found that. When I do File > New > Labels ... and choose Avery Letter/8162, the sheet is 7x2, with a 0.83" top margin.

I think the core of the problem is that Writer's built-in label sheets are designed for mail merge. For manually typing/printing labels, they're quite awkward to work with because of the way they're constructed. I sometimes recommend switching to a different type of label sheet based on a simple table but that's going to entail some work getting your label content over to a different document. The advantage is that it's much easier to manage when working manually.

If you're going to use the labels for different purposes (you mentioned mailing) then you may want to consider moving the content to a spreadsheet so that you can do a mail merge. That's by far the most flexible approach.

If you want to go that direction (moving to a table document or spreadsheet) we can talk about how to do that. If you want to stick with what you have, then we can talk about fixing the layout.

[Villeroy]

If you want to fill the label sheets manually, download the ODF template from the avery web site. These templates are plain Writer tables.

[thomasjk]

I second Villeroy's comment. Worldlabel has ODF templates also. http://www.worldlabel.com/Templates/wl-ol100OOv2.htm. I use their templates because the label creation process in AOO is difficult at best.They will also work for mail merge.

PS. the built in 8162 template is 2 columns by 7 rows.

[SteveKMFT]

Thank you to those of you who responded!
What I ended up doing was cutting and pasting the data from individual cells into the online label template on the Avery website, which while somewhat painstaking, was the easiest work around I could come up with last night. I will continue to explore the finer points of Mail Merging and plan to use a spreadsheet with Mail Merge.

I did notice, while printing labels from the Avery website, that the print job poorly formatted when "fit to page" was checked on the printer properties. It's possible I had that option checked with my earlier label printing attempts on the OpenOffice platform.