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Printing Envelopes, Labels, and Lists using Address Book

Address Book is a convenient program for managing the account's central contacts database, that also provides the ability to quickly print envelopes, labels, and lists from the contact information.

Topher Kessler MacFixIt Editor
Topher, an avid Mac user for the past 15 years, has been a contributing author to MacFixIt since the spring of 2008. One of his passions is troubleshooting Mac problems and making the best use of Macs and Apple hardware at home and in the workplace.
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Topher Kessler
2 min read

Address Book is a convenient program for managing the account's central contacts database, that also provides the ability to quickly print envelopes, labels, and lists from the contact information. While limited and relatively hidden, these options and various customizations for them are available in Address Book.

Keep in mind that Address Book is not a printing or illustrating program, so while it has options for printing contact information, it is limited in what it can do, and does not have the most intuitive approach to creating and customizing labels and envelopes. If you are looking for adding custom graphics and elaborate layouts for labels and envelopes, you will have better luck with applications like Pages, Word, or Illustrator; however, for simple and straightforward printing Address Book is perfectly adequate.

Printing Envelopes

  1. Select the group, or individual contacts in the address book (you can use the command key to select multiples).
  2. Press command-P to print, or select "Print" from the "File" menu.
  3. Click the triangle next to the printer to bring up the expanded printing options, if they are not already viewable.
  4. In the printing options drop-down menu, select "Address Book".
  5. In the now-available "Style" menu, select "Envelopes".
  6. You now have three options for adjusting the printed envelopes:

Layout: This allows you to choose from a number of common presets for envelope sizes and styles of layout. You can also choose a custom layout and enter the envelope size, and positions of the recipient and sender boxes.

Label: From here you can customize which labels are used, and how they are printed and displayed. You can choose to include various aspects of the address, adjust the font and text coloring, and choose a picture icon for the return address.

Orientation: This is just a setup for how the printer accepts envelopes, either in landscape or portrait mode.

Envelopes have a number of customizable options, both for the size and position of contents and for some smaller features like a return label graphic and fonts.

Printing Labels

The process for printing labels is the same as that for envelopes, except you should choose "Labels" instead of "Envelopes" in the "Style" menu. From there you can set the layout size from a number of available templates (Avery or DYMO), or create custom sizes. You can also customize the label contents, add images, and change the fonts using the "Label" tab.

The layout options for labels are similar to those for envelopes, but there are fewer additional customizations.

Printing Lists

Lists are the simplest to format and print. Apple has the option of either a standard list or a pocketbook contacts list, and has very few options for each. Basically, you choose the contacts attributes to use for the list, set the page size and orientation, and you are done. Pocket Book contact lists have an additional option of being indexed.

Lists in Address Book have very few options, but can be convenient if you use a pocket planner.

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