Specifying a Label Stock for Saved Documents

Frances noted that if she prepares a sheet of labels using the Avery 5066 label and then saves that sheet of labels as a Word document, when she later loads the Word document she can no longer tell which label stock (Avery 5066) the document should be printed upon. Frances wonders if there is some place she can look within the document to see what label stock is should be printed upon.

The short answer is that there is no place you can look to see the proper label stock to use—unless you create that place. There are a couple of different ways you can do this. For instance, you could open the Properties dialog box for the document and then enter the label stock information into the Comments field. This will be saved with the document and you can later refer to it with no problem.

Another possibility is to create a footer or header for the label document and place the information in one of them. This works great if you are using a label stock in which the labels don't take up the entire sheet area; the header or footer could be printed in this "unused" area, and would always be a reminder of which stock should be used.

Still another unique way to keep track of the information is to follow these general steps:

1. Create your label document as you normally would.
2. Create a new style that uses the same name as your label stock (for instance, name the style "Avery 5066"). The style doesn't need to be any different than the normal style used for the labels in your document.
3. Apply the style to the first paragraph in the document.
4. Save your label document.

Now, whenever you open the document and the insertion point is in the first paragraph, you'll see the label stock in the Style dropdown of the Formatting toolbar.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (582) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Specifying a Label Stock for Saved Documents.