I hate making labels with Mail-Merge

We have a modest Christmas card list. Mainly sales reps and agents and key customers. For a couple different reasons, I couldn’t just print the labels from our CRM program. It should be easy enough to do mail-merge labels in Word, right? Hardly. And there is no way I would expect my secretary to be able to deal with the problems I encountered. Here are the problems and solutions:

• Export from CRM in .dbf format is fine, but it establishes a ‘database name’ and range of cells. Because I moved around some columns after importing into Excel, those columns were no longer in the range and wouldn’t import.
  Solution: In Excel: Go to Insert>>Name>>Define (How arcane is that?)

• My mostly-blank ‘Address2’ column imported as zeros. Weird. A little Googling to find out that Word has decided the column is in ‘number’ format.
  Solution: In Excel: Select the column, then Format>>Cells>>Text

• I have my target’s names in a field called ‘Contact’, but the mail-merge tool doesn’t recognize this. It is looking for ‘First’ and ‘Last’ name fields. The nice thing is that the rest of my column titles it does recognize and inserts them all correctly.
  Solution: Rename the column to ‘First’. (You can also manually map the ‘First’ field to the ‘Contact’ column.)

• Whoa! When I ‘preview’ the results, everything is double-spaced. I can only guess that the label template is also influenced by Word’s Normal.dot file.
  Solution: Ctrl-A to select-all, then change the paragraph settings. (At this point, I also changed the font size to 9-point to make room for long labels of overseas addresses.)

• Then the labels print way to close to the top of the label, and some actually get cut off. While this gives some extra room for those overseas addresses, it is no help if half their name is cut off.
  Solution: I go to ‘Page Setup’ and change the top margin from 0.5 to 0.6

Wait, there is one more.

• Labels look all good, but I am only getting one sheet to print. And to add insult to injury, when I print, the printer ignores that I have selected ‘manual feed’.
  Solution: Turns out I hadn’t finished the mail-merge. Despite having what looks like good-to-go labels, they are actually just a ‘preview’ of the data. The last screen of the wizard gives you a choice to ‘print-out’ or ‘edit individual labels’. You have to choose one of these to complete the merge. Of course as soon as you select ‘print-out’ you get a printing dialog box and no way to know how many sheets of labels you need. Better to go with the ‘edit’ choice.

So there is my Word mail-merge label troubleshooting guide. Now that I have written this, maybe I can have my secretary do it next time, if I give her a copy.