July 17th, 2007
Caught on tape: Supposedly user-friendly label printing foiled by Microsoft and Avery
I’m at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley where I’m running Mashup Camp and, in true DIY (do it yourself) fashion and in an effort to keep costs low, I take care of printing the badges on my own. Where ever I go to run these events, an HP color Laserjet follows me (usually in a big honkin’ anvil case). I send via UPS ground in advance of the event so it meets me in whatever city we’re holding an event (eg: Mashup Camp, Startup Camp, etc.).
When I get to that city, I find the closest Staples or Office Depot and buy enough badges and badgeholders (made by Avery) to accommodate all the attendees. Then, while in my hotel room during the wee hours of the night just before the event starts, I export the most recent list of registrants from Salesforce.com to an Excel spreadsheet using Salesforce.com’s reporting feature. Finally, using Microsoft Word (which treats badges the exact same way it treats mailing labels), I set up the badges for printing — a process that involves running a mailmerge that uses the Excel spreadsheet as the data source.
When it comes to printing mailing labels or badges, Microsoft and Avery go to a lot of trouble to make printing perfect labels (or badges) a pain free process. But, as you can see in the video, the process is full of pitfalls that ultimately make perfect label (or badge) printing pretty much impossible (after going through the process four or five times, I still can’t get it right). One major problem is that when you buy the Avery badgestock, there’s no telling what will really come in the box. As you can see in the video, not only is the badgestock a different shade of white (from one box of badge stock to the next), the individual badges are also slightly different sizes from one box to the next). With that as the case, there’s pretty much no way to get reliable results.
Microsoft Word just makes matters even more confusing. What you see in Microsoft Word isn’t always what you get (that’s one problem I’ve had) and, as you’ll see in the video, the process for matching Word’s page layout to the badgestock autoselects the wrong badge height.
Who do you yell at when stuff like this happens?
