BeLight Labels & Addresses Review

The easy way to create and print your own labels and stationery...

February, 2009

By: Ian Osborne

Formerly known as Mail Factory, the new Labels & Addresses is a one-stop solution for creating and printing labels, envelopes and even name badges.

You get a wealth of predefined templates, covering labels for mailing, shipping, return addresses, handling and file folders. You can print envelopes, postcards, name badges and postal barcodes to facilitate automatic sorting (UK, US and Canadian only).

You can also create your own designs, getting pictures from your Mac, iPhoto or an integrated web search. When it comes to printing labels, envelopes and cards, designs for manufacturers like Avery, Xerox, Brother, DYMO, Printec, Seiko, A-One and more mean you can print on pre-cut label sheets.

Post master

Various sizes of postcard and envelope are offered. You'd struggle to find a size that isn't covered, but you can create your own templates if you need to.

Names and addresses can be added manually or imported from Address Book, MS Excel, MS Entourage, Now Contact, FileMaker, vCards or tab-delimited text files.

Although not instantly intuitive, Labels & Addresses is as straightforward as you could hope for, given its feature range. Creating your own designs isn't tricky, although its font management could be better. Not that it's terrible, but one or two tasks are a little more awkward than they need to be.

Two options are offered. The Standard Edition has 1,000 clip art images, while the Retail Edition costs an extra $10 (£7) but gives you 24,000 images and 50 bitstream fonts.

Labels & Addresses is a superb package. Its configurability, feature-set and versatility are beyond reproach, and it's a reasonable price, too. With a few minor tweaks to the editing interface it would be perfect, but as it stands, it's still very, very good.

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