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Dan'l said I'm gonna talk today about how to create specimen labels for insect collections using Microsoft Excel and a mail merge function with custom labels in Microsoft Word this is real time-saver if you've got a large collection or you're really in a time crunch sometimes in the past I've written out labels and it strains my eyes and it hurts my hands after a couple hundred and so this is just an easy way to get around that and really make those thus your collection pop so to start with what you want to do is create a list of your specimens with any pertinent information so I've got an Excel spreadsheet here with a number of columns the first is scientific name for those interested I'm using strata Kosta Alba Kosta which is the Western being cutworm other fields that I want to include in my labels and you create a column for each field that you're interested in the sex of the specimen the date collected where I collected it my name or whoever the collectors name is along with if you have your own collection system or you're at a university and want to contribute I've added just a column of some arbitrary unique identifiers to illustrate how well this approach works so once you have all of your information in an Excel spreadsheet make sure you save it somewhere that you'll remember and then you can close out of that the next thing you want to do is go to Microsoft Word and in this case I'm on a MacBook Pro so I'm using office 2016 for Mac and it's gonna look a little bit different from Microsoft Word in Windows but you should have all of the same functionality if for some reason you can't find something I'm referring to just google it and I think there's a lot of YouTube videos and resources out there to help you get along so at any rate to start your labels what you want to do is find the mailings option and so in this setup it's just the tab here at the top and then you want to go to start mail merge and I'll say that on a Mac if you expand and reduce your window size all these options collapse so if you don't see what I'm referring to right away expand things I'll make sure that all the icons have an opportunity to expand so go to start mail merge and then select labels and it'll bring you to this dialog box so you'll see that most of these are standard label specs that come pre-installed with office and this is if you want to print mailing labels or return addresses and go to staples or something like that it matches up all these numbers but what we actually want to do is create a unique label and you'll see here that I've already started this and so to give you an illustration of how this is set up however you'll click on new label and then it'll take you to this window I have a screen shot of what all the presets are for what I'm using and so I'll leave this up and just walk through this to give you a chance to write down the information and figure out exactly what it is that I'm doing so start by giving it a unique name specimen label - in this case and then you want to have all of these settings exactly the same and so in this case because I'm starting something new but I've already created this everything's entered but to explain what these are top margin is just the space between the top edge and the bottom edge and where your labels start or end side margin is similar except it's goes horizontally label height is the physical height of this label as well as label width it's the physical width vertical pitch refers to the distance between the centerline of this label and the centerline of the second label and then again similarly horizontal pitch it's the centerline going this way to the centerline of the next one and then finally I've already worked this out that if you put in 10 across and 20 down everything fits well as long as everything else the same and then you want eight-and-a-half by 11 letter size the type of paper you use is really it's an individual preference I know a lot of folks in entomology like to use archival paper that's resistant to fading but again it's really up to you so once you have these settings in you'll hit okay in this case I'll hit cancel because I've already got something set up but you'll hit OK and then you'll see that your new custom label shows up in the options so once you have that selected you're just gonna hit OK and you're gonna see that it puts a blank matrix into this document so what we want to do next is actually start adding fields from the Excel spreadsheet that we just created so to do that you're gonna go to select recipients we're not really working with recipients we're working with specimens but just ignore that fact go to use existing list and then you're gonna navigate to wherever you saved it and you're gonna choose this now for some reason on my Mac there's gonna be some squirrel eNOS happening with pop-up windows just ignore that we could still get everything done but just in case you're wondering don't get distracted so you'll click OK on that this is what I was talking about I'm just gonna click through these until you get to this so you don't need to do anything you don't need to select a cell range just click OK and now you get to this really neat dialog box this is where you can start entering your fields with custom information that will be dynamic from one label to the next so if you click this drop down will start with scientific name and anything in brackets is gonna be a placeholder which means that it's gonna insert information from a given record within your excel sheet and it's gonna add it in here you can also add straight text so if I were to add this in that text that I just typed would show up on every record so we don't want that but I was just illustrating example but what I do want is maybe a comma comma after the scientific name and then I think I want the sex of that specimen as well so then you would hit enter so that physically starts a new line within your label and then we'll add these other things so I want collection date I want location I want my name or whoever the collector is for a given specimen and then I want to add that unique collection ID and again see I just added a little static text there but while we do next you just click OK and watch what happens so now this record has been update or this this document has been updated and it says for each label I'm going to add this particular information now the first thing I notice here is that the formatting of the text is way too big and so if we just select everything in that table you can go to wherever you change these options for font I like to work with Arial but some people like to use a serif font like Times New Roman it's totally up to you I actually just manually type in 4 because the drop-down list doesn't go that far but if you choose font size 4 you'll see that everything starts to fit within each of these labels so su mning in real quick here you'll see ok so now I know generally that works this is the fun part so if assuming everything is ready to go I'm sorry I forgot so one of the things you want to make sure you do is you italicize the species name and so this would be the point at which you do that so if you just go to the first label cell and change it to look however you want I'm gonna italicize the species name and then maybe just bold this entire first name and then go back to mailings and hit update labels you'll see that it's gonna update that generic formatting for every single record on this sheet so once you do that this is the fun part so if you remember we've got maybe 20 or 25 specimen records if you go over here to preview results it's going to fill in this information and so now we have a unique label for each one of those specimen records it's got the species name with the sex it's got the collection date it's got the unique identifier and it's got the collector name and so that's really all there is to this if you want to print this record as it is you can go over here to finish and merge you can go here to print the document or you can go to edit individual documents if you've got everything set up you really shouldn't have to do anything else and so if you go in here for example I'll just show you it creates a new document it's got it has all of that background placeholder information removed and this is just a straight-up file which you can print everything is formatted well and that's really all there is for the process you can do this with ten specimens you can do this with thousands of specimens this process encompasses all shapes and sizes of this sort of thing so with that thank you very much and I hope this was helpful