Category: Geeks r Us
Hi all,
I do a fair bit of eBay selling. Most of this I can manage on my own, but at the moment, I'm having to get someone to write addresses on the packages that I'm sending. This isn't that much of an issue at home, but at university, whilst I know people that would quite gladly write them for me, I'd like to be able to do this myself so that I can post things when ever I want instead of when ever someone is available to do some writing.
I've looked at label printers, but I'd quite like to avoid buying another printer if I can help it. I've also found sheets of labels that are a4 size where the labels are arranged in a grid which I'm thinking would be the best solution.
My printer lets me set the left & right margins which in theory would solve the problem of the address covering multiple labels in a row, but I don't know if theres any way of telling a printer to only print on one label as opposed to printing part of the address on the next label - E.G. the one below the current one.
Does anyone have a good way of doing this? Hopefully the post office would tell me if the address had been screwed up, but obviously I'd like to avoid this if possible.
Cheers,
Ben.
Hi,
I've solved this now; if someone finds this post via Google I've included the solution:
The root I've taken is to buy sheets of labels and print to them from a normal inkjet printer. The sheets I have are a4 with 8 labels per sheet; in hindsight this is a bit overkill for addresses but their so cheap that I don't care that much.
It turns out that there are from what I can tell standards for label sizes. The company I bought mine from didn't tell me this, but it turns out that I've bought L7165 type labels.
Word has support for printing labels and thankfully, L7165 is one of the labels that it supports. You can create custom templates if your type isn't listed but whilst the dialogs are completely accessible, I don't think you'll be able to do this without eyes since you have to know a lot of information about the dimensions of each label & where the actual labels start on the sheet - mine wern't edge to edge.
Assuming you've chosen a type of label, you now have to enter the row and colum information. Obviously this isn't an issue for the first time you use a sheet, but you'll have to keep track of what parts of the sheet don't have labels on after you've printed more than one although this is fairly easy to do by touch.
One very important thing to bare in mind is that because of the way that printers work, if you print to row 1 colum 1 and once done you pull the paper out backwards which is usually the only way you can do it, the text will be on the bottom right most label and not top left as you would expect given that you've printed to row 1 colum 1. The first 2 times I did this I had sighted help to make sure they were printing ok; I've yet to try it on my own, but if you forget that the orientation is different, this could result in you posting things with blank labels or having multiple addresses on one label.
This does mean that when you peal the label off the text will be upside down but this won't be an issue since who ever processes your package can just flip it around.
Hopefully this will have helped someone.
Cheers.