

(Avery is a major producer of printable labels in all varieties.) What I remember as a quick set of clicks and formatting in the 1990s and 2000s took hours of fiddling to produce something that still didn’t look exactly like I wanted. I recently wrestled with Word to produce shipping labels for a Kickstarter project’s rewards, and every step was painful, despite its built-in templates for Avery labels. Microsoft Word has always had mail merge, but it’s far more complicated than the last time I used it.


It’s commonly used to generate form letters, address labels, and name tags. A concept dating back at least four decades, mail merge lets you insert placeholders in a template document that are replaced with entries in a column of data in a spreadsheet or similar tabular format. Apple removed the feature from the iWork suite as part of the fundamental rewrite of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote in 2013. 1647: Focus-caused notification issues, site-specific browser examples, virtualizing Windows on M-series MacsĪfter nearly a decade, Apple has finally brought mail merge back to Pages.#1648: iPhone passcode thefts, Center Cam improves webcam eye contact, APFS Uncertainty Principle.#1649: More LastPass breach details and 1Password switch, macOS screen saver problem, tvOS 16.3.3 fixes Siri Remote bug.#1650: Cloud storage changes for Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive quirky printing problem.#1651: Dealing with leading zeroes in spreadsheet data, removing ad tracking from ckbk.
