The first thing to do is to make sure that each address is a single
paragraph. Assuming that you have a paragraph break (¶) at the end of each
line and two breaks between addresses, here's how to do that:
1. Ctrl+H to open the Find and Replace dialog.
2. In the "Find what" box, type ^p (for a paragraph mark).
3. In the "Replace with" box, type ^l (that's a lowercase L, for a line
break).
4. Replace All.
5. Now Find ^l^l (two line breaks) and replace with ^p (a paragraph mark).
6. Now select all the text and Table | Convert | Text to Table, separating
at paragraphs. Select three for the number of columns. Before doing this,
make sure the margins (especially Left and Right) are correct for the size
labels you're using because Word will make three equal columns stretching to
margin width.
7. Finally, select the entire table and set the row height to the height of
the labels. You'll probably also want to set the vertical alignment of the
table cells to Center Vertically.
That answers the question you asked. To answer a question you didn't ask,
here's a better way to accomplish the same thing:
1. Use Convert Text to Table to make a table based on the existing
addresses. First remove the empty paragraphs by replacing ^p^p with ^p. Then
make a three-column table as before, but this time you'll have the name in
the first column, street address in the second, and city/state/ZIP in the
third. If desired, you can fine-tune to separate out the city, state, and
ZIP.
2. Add a heading row to identify the columns. You can then use this as the
data source for a mail merge, not only to labels but also to envelopes,
directories, or any other type of output.
For more on performing the merge (and creating a data source), see these
articles:
How to create a Mail merge
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/MailMerge/CreateAMailMerge.htm
Creating a mail merge Data Source
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/MailMerge/CreateADataSource.htm
The advantages to converting the address to a mail merge data source are
that (a) you can sort the data by name or address (or by ZIP or Last Name if
you break it down accordingly), (b) you can, as already mentioned, create a
variety of types of merged documents, and (c) most important, it is easy to
add new records to the list.
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site:
http://www.mvps.org/word
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
Melissa said:
I have a word document that looks like this:
My Bank
111 Any Street, Suite 101
Any Town, MI 49546
Your Bank
555 My Street
My Town, MI 49509
And so on down the page, it's about 13 pages of addresses. I am
interesting in turning this into address labels. To do that I need to
convert this to a table so that the entire paragraph (name and address) fits
into one cell. So there would be 3 columns with 10 rows per page. I have
done this before but have since forgotten how to do it again.
