ACC2000: Hints for Printing Mailing Labels

By using the Microsoft Access Report Wizard for mailing labels, you can quickly create a report design for many standard mailing labels. The Label Wizard has a Customize button that enables you to define your own label size and to save it as a template. Once saved, you can edit or duplicate your custom label templates. Defining your label is easy with the new graphical interface for choosing sizes, margins, columns, and type offset. However, sometimes you may have difficulty getting the labels to print correctly on your printer. This article discusses some hints and suggestions for getting labels to print correctly.

The Microsoft Access Report Wizard for mailing labels creates report specifications for standard mailing labels. However, in order to do so, it makes some assumptions about your printer, which may not be true. In particular, it assumes that it can print within a certain distance of each edge of the paper. Every Windows printer driver can have a different "printable region," which is the rectangle on the printed page that the application can print into. This rectangle may be smaller than the rectangle that the physical printer can print because of space and efficiency considerations in the printer driver. Therefore, you may not be able to print labels as close to the edge of the paper as you would like.

In general, the Report Wizard assumes that it can print within .25 inch of the edge of the paper. If you find that some of the text in your labels is being cut off or is not being printed at all, try going into design mode for the report and moving text items until all of the text prints. For example, select all the controls and move the entire group down a little within the detail section to adjust for a top label being missed. You may have to make the items smaller, choose a smaller font, and move them closer together to get everything to fit without the label being cut off at either the top or the bottom of the printed page.

If your printer has such a large top margin that you cannot move your text items down far enough (or if doing so results in a visually crowded label), the next thing to do is to change the Print Setup margins so that the first label on each page is not used. To do this, click Print Setup and add the height of your labels to the top margin provided by the Report Wizard. For example, if you are using 1 inch labels, and the top margin is .03 inch, change it to 1.03 inches to skip the first label on the page. If you are having trouble with the last line of the last label getting cut off, you can use the same technique on the bottom margin to cause the last label on the page to be skipped.

Another common problem is that some labels come on sheets that are 12 inches tall, whereas the print driver only recognizes 11-inch paper. In this case, you must ignore the last label on the page and use the labels that fall within the first 11 inches.