Printing barcodes for mailing envelopes speeds up delivery time and—if done correctly—reduces postage prices. How is this done? In this tutorial, we at Qualified Address will show you how to print barcodes using Microsoft Word 2007.
We’ll use the same public information used in our blog post “How Do I Comply With Privacy Laws?” so we have real address data in the tutorial. The data has been scrubbed with our CASS-Certified Scrubbing and is saved in Microsoft Excel, so we’ll see a couple screenshots showing where the data came from. We’ll be using a feature called “Mail Merge” which will coordinate data from our list in Excel with the envelopes in Microsoft Word.
*Before you begin, you will need the POSTNET barcode font, which is used in printing the barcodes. As a courtesy to visitors and customers, you may download the POSTNET font for FREE. Once you have downloaded POSTNET to your computer, you will need to install the font. On Windows-based computers, this is typically done by right-clicking on the downloaded file icon and clicking the install option*
Printing Barcodes
1. Begin setup. Open Microsoft Word 2007. Click the “Mailings” tab on the toolbar. From the “Start Mail Merge” list, select “Envelopes.”
2. Setup the document. When the “Envelopes Options” window opens, choose your envelope size from the dropdown menu. In this tutorial, we choose Size 10, which is the standard envelope size. Click OK, and the template of your document should look like an envelope. Enter the return address in the top-left corner of the document (unless your envelopes are already self-addressed).
3. Choose list. Click “Select Recipients” from the top toolbar, and select “Use Existing List” from the dropdown. Find the Excel file that contains the list of addresses you need, and click “Open.”
4. Choose your workbook. Microsoft Word will open the “Select Table” window so you can choose which workbook in Excel you wish to use. Here, ours is named “Sheet1”. Make sure the checkbox at the bottom labeled “First row of data contains column headers” is checked before clicking “OK.” 
5. Create template.
a) Click anywhere on the bottom half of the envelope with the cursor, and a box outlined by dotted blue lines should appear with the blinking cursor inside it. On the toolbar, click on “Insert Merge Field.” The dropdown list will show all of the fields contained in your Excel file. The fields you will need for a barcode are: QA_Firmname, QA_DeliveryLine1, QA_City, QA_State, QA_FullZIPCode, and QA_Barcode. Essentially what you are doing in this step is creating a template with a barcode for the delivery addresses.
b) Select QA_Firmname, from the dropdown list. It should now be displayed inside the blue box with two less than/greater than symbols on either side. (<
>)
c) Choose the rest of the fields we need, and put them in the correct address format.
*Notice below that we’ve added a comma and a space in between “QA_City” and “QA_State” and also in between “QA_State” and “QA_FullZIPCode. Also,to maintain space between the address and the barcode, we’ve added a full blank line between “QA_Barcode” and the other fields. Word will not automatically add a space between the fields in your document, so you must do this yourself.
6. Change to barcode font. Highlight the field “QA_Barcode” and go to the “Home” tab on the toolbar.From the font dropdown box, scroll down to the USPS Bar Code font and click it, choose the barcode font.
*Don’t worry if you can no longer see “QA_Barcode”—it will be visible in the next step. (Barcodes only display numbers, not letters.)
7. Preview your barcodes. To preview the final document including the barcode, click the “Mailings” tab on the toolbar. Click “Preview Results” near the right side of the toolbar to see it with the barcode.
If you have done everything correctly, your envelope should like the one below. Make sure the barcode is displayed as the POSTNET Barcode on each envelope, like the one in our example. You can cycle through, viewing a few of your addresses, by clicking the arrow buttons to the right of “Preview Results” as seen in the previous image.
8. Print barcodes to envelopes. Click “Finish & Merge” on the toolbar. Three options are given for finishing the merge: “Edit Individual Documents,” “Print Documents,” and “Send Email Messages.” Choosing “Edit Individual Documents” allows you to make other changes to each individual envelope. “Print Documents” allows you to print off all the envelopes, ready to be mailed, with barcode already added. “Send Email Messages” allows you to email the documents in attachment, HTML, or plain text formats.
Here is an example of what the finished product would look like with the barcode:
We at Qualified Address are committed to reducing your mailing costs with our address scrubbing services. Make the provident choice today by visiting QualifiedAddress.com to see which of our services can help you and your business cut those expensive mailing costs!
