When you think of printing address labels in Office (as many of us do around this time of year), your first thought might be to set up a "mail merge" operation in which you store your data in Excel or Access, and then merge it into Word or Publisher for the final printing. However, you may not realize that you can eliminate some of those moving parts by using Access for the entire operation--storing your data and printing the labels.

Store the data

The first step is to get your address information into Access, if it's not there already. You can create a Contacts database by using one of the Contacts database templates, or you can add contact information to an existing database by adding the Contacts Application Part.

For more information about Application Parts, see Add an application part in the article Create a new database.

Print the labels

Once your addresses are safely stored in Access, create a new label report that is formatted for the type of label you have. Check out the video Create mailing labels in Access (6:52) to see how it's done.

For a print version of this procedure, see the article Create mailing labels in Access.

But I like merging!

Of course, the traditional mail merge into Word or Publisher is also a great way to get the job done. To merge with Word, you can kick off the merge process from within Access: on the External Data tab, in the Export group, click Word Merge.

Or, to come at it from the other direction, you can launch the Mail Merge Wizard from within Word or Publisher, and then specify your Access database as the source for the list of addresses.

Happy Mailing!