Every year we go through the ritual of revising our Christmas card list. It’s always been a manual process in Excel because my wife must have each card addressed exactly right. A card could be addressed to Mr. John Smith, The Smiths or the Smith Family, depending on John’s success with women.
After seeing a few other friends’ address management methods using Microsoft Word, then hearing one couple talk about what an organizational mess their handwritten cards were, I decided to do what I should have done years ago: create a method to rely on the same address book we use on a daily basis to generate our list. We use Contacts (formerly Address Book) on our Macs. Contacts syncs via iCloud to our iPhones and iPads and, after years of syncing nightmares, I believe this technology is now nearly flawless.
So the issue at hand was to print address labels from a group in Contacts exactly the way my wife would like them to read. The solution is to set a custom field in Contacts for Christmas cards, and use that field to print the labels.
HINT: if you are not as persnickety as my wife about how the labels read, you can’t print labels directly out of Contacts. Just set up a group that has all your card recipients, highlight it, then print and choose labels. It will print a label for all addresses by default, so change it on the Labels tab to Home only.
