Make a tent card using Word and Excel

I needed to make some tent cards for my wife.  She wanted the cards to contain a number that could be seen from either side of the card (front and back).  There were 60 of them to do.

You can't do this in WORD unless you hard code the number then convert it to Word Art and flip it over.  Me do that 60 times! I don't think so.

So I decided to use the Mail Merge feature in Word and then feed in the table numbers from an Excel file.

All of this was done using Word and Excel 2010.

STEP 1 - Make an Excel file.  I made an Excel file with one column titled TABLE and then filled it the column with the numbers (auto numbering of course).

My numbers began at 29 and then went up from there.

STEP 2 - Open Word.  I opened a blank WORD document then clicked on "Mailings".

Some options will be greyed out until you click do STEP 3

STEP 3 - Point WORD at the EXCEL file. Click on "Select Receipents->Use Existing List" and then select the EXCEL file.

STEP 4 - Insert data field. When you click on the "Insert Merge Field" it will expose the name of the colums in your Excel. In my case there was only one column (entitled TABLE) but you could have more than one if your needs required it. When I select TABLE it drops it into the Word document (not to be confused with the "Table" feature in Word).

STEP 5 - Page Setup. Now set the font size for your fields, Center them if needed and then go to Page Setup and set custom margins on the page so the field prints on the bottom half of the page (card).

STEP 6 - Printing Part 1. Put the card stock in your printer then click the "Finish & Merge" button.

I had to feed my card stock into my printer manually

STEP 7 - Printing Part 2. Turn the printed cards around (and re-order them) and do the same thing over again.

BOOM! Tent cards.