Preparing Mailing Labels in the Appropriate Format

The acceptable format for mailing addresses varies from country-to-country. For example, when sending mail to an address in France, the Postal Code should appear before the City (as opposed the U.S. format of City, State ZIP Code).

When preparing mail destined for international locations, Aptify can automatically generate labels in the appropriate format for a particular country, either for a single address or for a set of addresses in a bulk mailing, as described in the following sections:

• Preparing a Single Mailing Label from a Form
• Printing Bulk Mailing Labels

Preparing a Single Mailing Label from a Form

In Aptify, addresses in a wide range of services, including Companies, Persons, Organizations, and Employees, have a common interface that includes the Address Management Toolbar.

This toolbar contains two buttons that generate a label for the displayed address in the appropriate format for that address's country:

• Copy Address To Clipboard: When a user clicks this button (the first button circled in the figure below), the currently displayed address is copied to the Windows clipboard in the appropriate label format for the address's country. Then, the user can paste the address into another program, such as Microsoft Word.

• Preview Label: When a user clicks this button, Aptify displays a preview of the current address's label, automatically localized to the appropriate format for that particular country (see the sample label previews below).

  See Using the Address Management Toolbar for more information on the Address Management toolbar.

  
  

Aptify localizes an address label based on information stored in the Label Lines tab of the country's corresponding Countries record. (The Countries service appears in the Aptify Framework Administration and Localization applications by default. See About the Countries Form for more information on this service.)

The Label Lines tab stores the standard Address copy/preview format for the country. Each sub-type record on this tab corresponds to one line on an address label. Aptify then uses this format to generate mailing label previews or when copying an address to the Windows clipboard for pasting into another program.

The following figure illustrates the label lines format for France.

The Label Lines data is universal to Persons and Companies. If a particular field in the Label Lines definition is not applicable or is blank for a record, then the label does not include that item (and it also does not display blank rows). When previewing a label for a person's record (as shown below), the system ignores the <Name> parameter in the first line since the Persons service, does not have a Name field. Also, the address in the example below has no Line 2, Line 3, or Line 4 so this information is not displayed in the label.

The following figure illustrates a second example (the label lines format for Japan).

When selecting the Preview Label button for a Company, the system displays the Company Name (based on <Name>) but not <First Name>, <Last Name>, and <Company> since these fields are not applicable to the Companies service (as shown below).

Note that not all countries currently have a Label Lines format defined in Aptify. However, an administrator can specify the appropriate format as needed by specifying or modifying Label Lines data in the Countries records.

Printing Bulk Mailing Labels

Aptify include standard reports that generate mailing labels for Persons or Companies. These reports correspond to Avery labels to simplify printing and mailing. (See Using Reporting Tools for information on how to generate reports using the Report wizard.)

In addition, these standard label reports support international address formatting. When a view contains an address outside of the United States, the report localizes the label format based on the address's country so that each address appears in its appropriate mailing format.

For example, in the figure below, a user created an Avery Label 5161 report from a view that contains Persons records in three different countries: the United States, Canada, and Japan. Although all three addresses appear on the same label report, each one uses a different label format, based on the accepted mailing requirements for its country.