I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this for a while and now that I finally figured it I thought I’d document it 🙂 Hope someone finds this useful! Also a great way to print out cards for board games on both sides This may seem like a very tedious process but it’s nice when you are printing 100-200 cards. Also P.S. my printer messed up a couple of times and I had to re-print some of the words by deleting the messed up prints. Sorting/aligning words and definitions and printing again.
I got a bit of help from the links below
Sources:
Changing layout of word document: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI0MG05OojQ
Using Mailing merge document: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/merge-excel-data-word-documents-54185.html
Center text vertically: https://www.howtogeek.com/240521/how-to-center-text-vertically-on-the-page-in-microsoft-word/
1) Preparing the excel spreadsheet
- Open a new spreadsheet and on sheet 1 place two columns with headers “front” and “back”
- Now fill in the corresponding information for front on column 1 and back on column 1
2) Preparing the word document
- File> New blank document
- Layout>Page Setup>bottom right corner
- Margins Tab
- Change margins to 0.5″
- change to landscape
- Paper Tab
- width: 8″
- height 5″
- Layout Tab
- Change Page Vertical alignment to Center
- Click OK
Set Layout 
Preview new layout 
Select excel sheet and columns 
Insert front of words 
Format the text to fit the size of the index card 
Preview card 
See ALL cards and fix any overflows 
overflows fixed! 
Changing printer paper tray!
3) Import/Auto-fill with Excel words
Mailings Tab> star mail merge >Start Mail Merge> Step by step mail merge wizard
step 1 Select Document –> Letters
step 2 Select Starting document –> use current document
step 3 Select recipients –> use and existing list and browse for excel sheet (with header in sheet one with one column)
step 4 Write your letter –> click on…more items and select column header and press insert
step 4b –> Now format the text size( ~100) and set align horizontally
step 5 Preview your letters –> Nothing really to change, click next
step 6 complete merge –> Click on “Edit Individual Letters” Merge records, select ALL
* Now fix any of the cards where the text is overflowing into the next card. Highlight and change text size to something smaller.
4) Print front of cards
- Now you should be able to print these cards in the order they appear in the excel column
- Note: Also there seems to be a error in the last card with it not being centered. Print a blank card at the end of the list.
5) Back Side
- Repeat with Column 2 inserting “back” instead of “Front”
- Generate another set of pages with the back text on all the cards. Font size should be about 30 depending on the index card size and amount of text.
- Make a note of how your printer is printing relative to how you load the index cards into the paper feed
- Load the cards in order of how you previously printed the words or the definitions won’t match up
- Repeat this guide to create a set of cards with the definitions based on the excel sheet.
