I have used Excel and Word to merge my christmas card labels for a number of years. It has always proved tricky (probably because I forget what to do from one year to the next), but this year I am really hitting a problem that I hope someone can help me with.

I am using the mail merge wizard, and the results do not fit the sticky labels I have. I have even manually set the dimensions and layout of the label page. No luck - the spacing of the labels is consistently too small, so the printing drifts up.

It looks like they create a table and then insert the addresses into the table. I have inspected the table settings in Word, and the row height is correct (in this case 3.84 cm)



Even with that, the spacing is not correct. I have even drawn borders around the cells (see below) and printed off the page. When I have measured the depth of the cell, it is not 3.84cm but closer to 3.6 cm. That accounts for the drift upwards




So - somewhere between the formatting of the table and the printing the dimensions are getting mixed up. I have tried to inspect the printer settings incase it is in some way scaling the print. The cell width is also reduced from 10.03 specified to something slightly over 9.42 printed.

It seems to me that the mail merge programme is throwing something at the printer that it cannot pront, and so it is scaling it down to fit (I am specifying A4 paper, not Letter).

Any thoughts and suggestions?