Making life with labels a little easier

Labels don't always match up perfectly, especially those little return address labels.

What can you do, besides prayer and fasting, and wasting labels?

I try to just give the labels some room to make mistakes without screwing up my text, by putting some space around the label text. It's nothing all that complicated, but I hate to think of dealing with labels without it.

See also this entry, another way of tweaking labels.

First, you make your labels. Do whatever you need to do, but on the Options tab, select Synchronize contents. Then click New Document to create the label sheet.

You'll get something like this, the red arrows particularly with very small labels where the default font size, 12, doesn't fit.

Next, select the upper left label and make the font as small as you need to to fit the content on. You might need to just select a line or two at a time or select All. Apply a 6-point font or less if necessary, and I like to use a sans serif font like Nimbus Sans L or Helvetica. Now you can see all the content.

With the first label selected, find the little hourglass shaped icon on the ruler, marking the left margin.

And drag that icon to the right to give the text a little breathing room on the left.

Now that you've given it room on the left, give it room on the top. Click to the left of the first line of text in the first label and press Return.

Now with your cursor in the new blank line, type in the font size box, perhaps a 4, and press Return.

And now there's a nice scosh of blank text above the content, too.

The label is how you want, so just click that Synchronize button to make all the labels like the first one.

---

---

Comments

[Kunvp]

Thanks a lot,

What a clear and useful blog.

Greetings from Belgium.

Kun

[Dave]

This is very helpful information, but my question is is there a way to put a picture on the label with text?

[Solveig]

Yep, see this entry.
http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2007/01/putting_graphic.html