Hi,

I'm so sorry, this is a really basic question. I'm not familiar with any of this scripting stuff or creating databases. I just wanted a solution to use as-is for my mac, and bought this thinking I could "figure it out" as far as making it meet my needs. Did not know how complicated it could be!

My very basic question is this: how do I print mailing address labels? Printing an address on an envelope is pretty straight forward and obvious, but I can't figure out how to just print to labels. I've tried exporting the contact info into an excel document (thinking I could do the mail merge function in Word) but Filemaker crashes each time.

Help please?
-Jackie

Hi Jackie,

First, please let me apologize. We moved our web site to a new host today (Sunday 1/13/2008) and your post was written to the old server just as we finished up. So I've recreated your post above, but you'll need to register again if you'd like to. I'm sorry for the inconvenience!

So, in answer to your question, the easiest way to print labels is to make a new layout. Enter layout mode and select "New Layout/Report..." from the layout's menu. Follow the steps in this wizard and it will walk you through making a label layout using any of the pre-defined sizes in FileMaker.

On the very first screen, make sure you "Show records from:" the Contact table. The select "Labels" as your layout type.

On the third screen you'll be asked to pick any of several available fields: the only field you need to select is ContactAddressMailToCalc.

When you're done, you'll see this layout listed in the "layout" drop down list in the left hand status area. Now you can return to the contacts tab, "find" the contacts you're interested in, then switch to this new layout before printing them.

There are a bunch of other ways to do this, tying the new layout into the mailings component, etc. But this new-layout method is simple and very versatile.

Hope that helps!