Including a picture in mailing label

Hi Granddad,

It is possible to include a graphic in a mail merge to labels.

• In the menu of the Mailings > Start Mail Merge button, choose Labels. Select the correct vendor and product for the label sheets you'll be printing. Then click the Select Recipients button and choose the data source file.
• It will be helpful to go to the Table Layout ribbon and click the View Gridlines button, which shows dotted lines for the cell borders that match the edges of the labels. Also click the ¶ button on the Home ribbon to display hidden and nonprinting characters, including paragraph marks.
• Click in the top left cell of the table and insert the graphic you want. Click the Layout Options button that appears next to the graphic and ensure that the In Line with Text button is selected.
• Use the Insert Merge Field button on the Mailings ribbon to insert the names of the merge data in the top left field, next to or below the graphic. The result could look like this:

You may have to make the graphic smaller to fit everything onto the label.

• Click the Update Labels button to the right of the Insert Merge Field button. That copies everything in the top left cell and pastes it into all the other cells (which already include a <Next Record> field).
• Click the Preview Results button to check that the labels look properly formatted. When you're satisfied, click the same button again to turn it off.
• Click the Finish & Merge button. Choose either Print Documents to send the labels to the default printer, or Edit Individual Documents to create a new document containing the finished merge, which you can save to print later.

If you have questions about any of these steps, please reply here.

P.S.: I doubt you have many years on me. At 76, I'm still learning new things about Word. And I'm not the oldest of the regulars in this forum!

Are you creating a label merge, as Jay assumes, or just wanting to print a sheet of labels? If the latter, then, in the Labels dialog, select the vendor and stock number as described and then click New Document:

This will give you a sheet of labels. They're set up as a table, so make sure you have table gridlines displayed so you can see the label boundaries. Then select a label, right-click, and choose Split Cells..., which will give you this dialog:

The default setting (2 columns, 1 row) is what you want, so click OK. Then you can put your picture in the left cell and the text in the right. Unfortunately, there's no quick way to propagate this setup to the remaining cells, so you'll have to do them one at a time (AFAIK), and if you are doing a mail merge, you could insert merge fields, but I'm not sure how the Update Labels command would behave.

Doug, I started to recommend Graham's page, but I took another look at it and decided it would probably be more confusing than what I wrote instead. It appears that Graham hasn't updated the page since Word 2010, and while Word's mail merge feature hasn't changed much since then, the UI doesn't look the same. Also, Graham's method involves making a watermark and saving it as an AutoText entry, but I confirmed by experiment that neither of those steps is necessary for including a small graphic in the merge document in the current version of Word.

Also take a look at the following page of Graham Mayor's website

https://www.gmayor.com/graphics_on_labels.htm

Thank you both.

My idea is to have the image on the left hand side of the label, small enough to leave room for an address to be added alongside it.. How will this affect the process?

Jay, being 12 years older than you I could be the oldest Word newbie. Previous limited experience has been with Works.