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Oracle1729

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 4, 2009
638
0
I'd like to print a couple of hundred envelopes from address I have in a semi-csv format basically "firstname,fulladdress". Is there a good way to do this, even if I have to do a lot of cutting and pasting. I probably will need to print another set in a few months that will include about half of these and a lot from another list.

Everything I've found online (such as pages, and contacts itself) says it automatically pulls the addresses out of contacts. This isn't helpful to me, I don't want to add hundreds of addresses to my contacts and it looks like on ML it's cloud based so I need to create a new iCloud account to do that? Also Contacts assumes too much about how I want the envelope formatted based on what it can pull from the records, like trying to mix Mr. and Mrs. from two records which it always seems to guess wrong. It seems like this was so easy last time I did it (about 20 years ago using MS Works in Win 3.1), and so much harder now.
 

prisstratton

macrumors 6502a
Dec 20, 2011
542
126
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
I'd like to print a couple of hundred envelopes from address I have in a semi-csv format basically "firstname,fulladdress". Is there a good way to do this, even if I have to do a lot of cutting and pasting. I probably will need to print another set in a few months that will include about half of these and a lot from another list.

Everything I've found online (such as pages, and contacts itself) says it automatically pulls the addresses out of contacts. This isn't helpful to me, I don't want to add hundreds of addresses to my contacts and it looks like on ML it's cloud based so I need to create a new iCloud account to do that? Also Contacts assumes too much about how I want the envelope formatted based on what it can pull from the records, like trying to mix Mr. and Mrs. from two records which it always seems to guess wrong. It seems like this was so easy last time I did it (about 20 years ago using MS Works in Win 3.1), and so much harder now.

I would use Mail Merge in MS-Office to do this, it can pull the data from a .csv file into Word and then print your envelopes. If you do not use MS-Office then OpenOffice can do the same thing:

http://www.openoffice.org/documentation/manuals/oooauthors/Mail-Merge.pdf
 

Oracle1729

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 4, 2009
638
0
I would use Mail Merge in MS-Office to do this, it can pull the data from a .csv file into Word and then print your envelopes. If you do not use MS-Office then OpenOffice can do the same thing:

http://www.openoffice.org/documentation/manuals/oooauthors/Mail-Merge.pdf

Thanks for your reply, sorry for the lack of thanks, I just wanted to get the job done. Your advice was very useful.

I ended up using openoffice. The database part went pretty smoothly until I changed the list display format when I was trying to print the listing and can't get it to look right. Apparently envelope printing is a disaster in openoffice it took a lot of trial and error and wasted envelopes until I got something that looks like crap on the screen but prints right (based on my searches, this is normal for openoffice).

Anyway, the job is done, the end results are perfect and I just wanted to say thanks for steering me in the right direction.
 
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