Every time I publish a magazine, I send out checks to writers afterward. The checks go out to more or less the same people every time, although the group has grown over the years. At some point, hand-writing the envelopes got to be a bit of a pain. Plus, we ran out of pre-printed envelopes and I’m too cheap to get more printed, especially when people just throw envelopes away.
If I’m writing a letter, I’ll often use Word’s Envelope and Labels command to do a quick envelope. All you have to do is highlight the return address in your letter and chose Tools | Envelopes and labels. The address appears in the Delivery Address box, ready to go. All you have to do is put an envelope in the printer and click Print.
But with multiple envelopes, this process becomes cumbersome. You could do a mail merge, but that seems sort of silly for 5 or 6 envelopes. The best thing is to just set up a document that contains all your envelopes with addresses. So in my case, I created a new document called Writer_Envelopes.doc.
The trick is setting the page size correctly. In the Word world, each envelope is a new page. Choose File|Page Set up to set it up correctly. Your margins will depend on whether you want to include your return address or not. If you have a stamp or preprinted envelopes and don’t want to include a return address, in the Margins tab, set the top margin to 1.5 inches, the bottom margin to .5 inches, the left margin to 4 inches and the right margin to 1 inch.
In the Paper Size tab, change the drop-down to Com 10 Envelope and the orientation to Landscape. In the Paper Source tab, change the source to Manual or Envelope feeder, if your printer has one.
If you decide to import your logo or include a return address, set the top and left margins to .5 or even a little less, depending on how close your printer can print to the edge of the page. You also should create a style or format your address text with a left indent of 4 inches.
Type your addressee information into the envelope and press Ctrl+Enter to add a new page (i.e. envelope) to the document. When you’re done, put some envelopes into the printer and start printing away. Because you can save the file, the next time you have to run the same bunch of envelopes, all you have to is open the file and print.