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christmas cards

How do I make labels for my Christmas cards?


I would like to do labels for Christmas cards this year. Is this something that you can help me set up? Is it truly worth the effort to do it? My list is about 250-275.

I’d like to have the flexibility to use either white or clear labels from year to year, depending on the color envelopes our Christmas cards are. Last year, my husband’s assistant sent me the template and the Staples (clear) labels that are compatible with Avery 5160/8160. It was a cumbersome way for me to do the labels. I had to type the addresses that filled a sheet of labels. I couldn’t figure out how to add pages or to save a page separately.

Most of our labels will be Mr. and Mrs. but some will be The ____ Family. Will we be able to do it this way? Will it be in an Excel spreadsheet? Currently, my Christmas card list is a Word document.

I want to make sure that the outcome of doing the labels will be what I want it to be and that it will be easy for me to update the list each year to reflect new addresses, new friends to send cards and delete recipients as needed. Make sense?

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Yes. Makes sense. The way I approach this task is to add a company name to each contact in the address book (Contacts) on the Mac.

Then once a year, flip everyone to become a company, print the labels using that application (Contacts on the Mac) then flip them back to being individuals.

You will have more people in your contacts than you want to send cards to of course, so you make a group in Contacts. Add the salutation you like in the company field, select all, make a company, print, select all, set them back as individuals.

The busy work is adding the proper salutation in the company field. But this only has to be done once then you have them for the rest of your life.

Note, if you don’t flip them back in Contacts from company back to individual, if they were to call you, on your phone you would see “Mr and Mrs. Smith” incoming call.

If you’d like, we can do a remote session and I can assign you the proper homework steps before we go to print later after you’ve added all the Mr. Ms, family etc… stuff.

There is also another option. Some people have a completely separate user just for this but it’s really not necessary. This would only be something to do if we needed to start from a spreadsheet alone.

Honestly, once it’s set up, I think you’ll find this much easier in the long run for managing this in the future. Just takes some setup work on the front end.

As far as wether you want clear, white, pink or purple, that choice isn’t relevant. You can choose whatever Avery label type you want. The hard part of the job is typing in “The Sells Family”.

How do I flip my contacts to print Christmas cards?

Scotty, I have a question. Scotty - A while back, you showed me how to create a group in contacts and "mark as company" the whole group for the purpose of Christmas cards, i.e. the address reads The Smith Family versus Mary Smith. I can't remember how to "mark" the whole group versus going one contact at a time. When I "select all", the "mark as company" and "mark as person" options are disabled. Please advise. Thx so much.
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This was a feature that was included in Apple's MacOS address book for many years then they removed it for about 4 years. The good news is it is back but you need to be on macOS Catalina 10.15 in order to see that functionality. If you've not yet updated or don't want to at the moment, I can assist if needed.

Depending on the age of your computer, you can go to the App Store on your Mac and then search for “Catalina”. It is 10.15. After the update, you’ll again be able to flip all contacts from person to company all at once.

Note: always make sure you’ve backed up your computer before ever doing an update.
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