Trouble printing envelopes

Heather Jacob 4

Hello all!


I'm looking for ideas of where to look to solve an odd envelope occurramce.


I use the Word Merge Wizard to generate my acknowledgement letters. Once the Word document has been created, I print the letters, then use the Word method for envelopes of highlighting the addressee block on each letter and using Mailings >> Envelope >> Print.. I do it this way because most of the time I delete several letters from the document. I have it printing to both the donor and the soft credited person and a lot of the time that soft credit is the spouse.


I'm using a multi-letter template for most of the letters with 6 different letter templates based on what fund they gave to. When I print envelopes from the word document generated by this template, the addressee block is not centered on the envelope. I get a verticle line about an inch long on the left side of the envelope and a horizontal arrow on the right side, and the address block is about 2 inches further right than it should be.


This does not happen with the single-letter templates I have set up.


Has anyone else run into this problem?

Faith Murray

Heather, in the past I have encountered glitches with some of the oldest envelope templates in our system. They would print in a different font than the one I selected. Weirdest thing. I was unable to fix the mail merge record even when all the settings were identical to a functioning mail merge. At that point I just re-created the envelope merge from scratch, and all was well.

Heather Jacob 4

Thanks Faith!


I'm hoping for a solution that doesn't require rebuilding all my letter templates. The templates are designed to look like letterhead, so there's a footer, logos in a couple places, and a list of Board members down one side. It's time consuming.


It's nice to know I'm not the only one having strange printer errors!

Cara Olsen 2

I'm not sure if this will help, but after generating my acknowledgment letters, I then go back and choose export. I take that export and use it in a Word envelope template. I never mark letters as being acknowledged until both the letters and envelopes are printed. Once printed, I use the export button again to mark the donors as being acknowledged.

Heather Jacob 4

Thanks Cara!


I have determined that it has something to do with the revision tracking in Word. I generate the letters and send the Word file to my Director. She then goes through them all and makes little changes, using the tracker so I can see exactly what she's changing and can then make those changes in the templates. I've discovered that the issue does not occur if I print the envelops from my original, un-edited, version.

Marguerite Gravois

Just wanted to be sure you were aware that if you are running a merge with multiple letter templates, the formatting will pull from the letter template that is at the top of the letter list in the merge, so not a problem with a single letter. Hope this helps!