Need to print a lot of labels. Need to stay sane.

Are you using a template downloaded from the company that made the labels? Or a Word template? Also in the past, I've printed test sheets on regular paper and held them up to the light with a sheet of blank labels behind it to see if they were fitting properly, saves wasting label sheets.

Printing labels will drive you mad. Avery (the major label company) has a service called http://www.avery.com/weprint/landing.shtml?int_id=banner-adpowpstepsv40615-weprintlp where they take care of the printing for you and mail you the labels. Might be worth it.

Print on plain paper while you try various things, cut the paper in half vertically through a row of addresses, and put on top of a label sheet -- that's a lot cheaper than testing on labels. One thing that may be happening is scaling -- it's not printing at 1:1, it's scaling to fit the page, in particular, its enlarging. See if there's a setting about that and turn it off -- for label printing to work properly, you have to layout 1:1. A test you can do is to draw a box with exactly 1 inch margins on the page (or 2cm if you're in the real world) and print that, then measure. If you're not seeing 1"/2cm margins when you're printing, adjust your printing settings until you are. Then try the labels with those settings (on plain paper until they're good, of course -- then start printing on label stock.)

Try printing on paper, then photocopy onto labels.

The printer, I'v e had the same trouble, but the same doc on a different printer doesn't do it.

Check the settings for paper size. One of them, somewhere, might be set to a different size than you are using (A4 versus letter size is the most common problem). Windows keeps its paper size settings in some unexpected spots.

If the vertical spacing on all of your labels is off regardless of brand, do you think it could be your printer that's not feeding correctly (since it feeds in the vertical direction)? Think of it this way, it pulls the paper up, prints the first label, needs to move down 1" to the next, but instead moves 1.1", then prints. It needs to move down another 1" to the third label, but moves 1.1" (now you're at 2.2" but should be at 2.0"). The inaccuracies pile up like so: 1.0 -> 1.1 2.0 -> 2.2 3.0 -> 3.3 4.0 -> 4.4 5.0 -> 5.5 6.0 -> 6.6 Which is why you can't just say "oh, I'm off by point six inches at the bottom, let me take that out and then everything will be fine". You can either (1) try a different printer or (2) adjust the height of all rows by whatever the difference between expected and actual is. The easiest way to figure out where the problem lies is to turn on the cell borders (labels in Word are just tables) and print that on the labels, you should be able to easily measure how much you're off by. You might have to do it a few times to zero in because the reductions aren't one to one.

Are you loading the labels with correct side as the top of the page?

To follow up with TWinbrook8 above, it looks like your printing is fine "on screen", but has it printed fine on paper? Plain paper, not labels. If not, then it's not the labels. PLUS, if not, then it's probably not the printer, its probably the formatting. For whatever reason, printing a table onto labels, even though it *should* work, sometimes doesn't work, because of spacing between the labels, or some other reasons. Use label templates if at all possible; worse comes to worst, you can customize the labels to fit what you have in Word.