Mike Morearty
19 Dec 2010

Mailing labels: Google vs. Apple

For years, my wife and I have used Microsoft Excel + Microsoft Word to do mailing labels for Christmas cards. The workflow is weird and confusing, but at least we are familiar with it.

Since I’m a Google fan and an Apple fan, and feel that both companies are really good at making things easy, and since my wife and I are both on Macs now, I thought I’d see how good a job those companies do.

For Google, searched for info on how to do mailing labels in Google Docs. They claim to support labels, but their “solution” is hilariously bad: Start with a document template (people upload tons of them), and then manually change each label. Ha!

Apple’s solution is hard to find (I found it by googling), but once you do find it, it’s awesome. Export your list to a CSV file, then import the data into the Address Book app, and then say File > Print. One of the printing choices is Labels; and you can specify which Avery label type you want, and you’re done!

And they did a beautiful job of handling a few issues I was worried about:

So it’s a knockout punch, Apple wins.

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