This is a little labor-intensive, but substantially less so than hand-numbering all of them. Perhaps it can be modified to create what you're looking to do?

http://word.tips.net/...Numbered_Labels.html

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''The enemy isn't conservatism. The enemy isn't liberalism. The enemy is bulls**t.''

—Lars-Erik Nelson

yeah, i think it's going to have to be something like that.

the idea is to print them as long rectangles, to fold down the middle (double-sided printing would be too much of a pain in the ass, i think.)

issue then is to maybe find a 'label'-type template that works.

or find a way to make double-sided printing possible . . . i'm in africa, so this stuff is always twice as hard as it should be.

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____________________________________
https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

Mail merge.


Set up the database in Excel, the template in Word...easy peasy...

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

Doublesided printing is a real PITA for this stuff. Fold then laminate is the best way.

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

Maybe, maybe not. If you could set them up as table templates and have every odd page be the "front" and every even page be the "back," if you have a printer that does double-sided printing, it could work pretty well.

Again . . . kind of labor-intensive, but not as bad as the alternative.

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''The enemy isn't conservatism. The enemy isn't liberalism. The enemy is bulls**t.''

—Lars-Erik Nelson

Hire a printing company to do it?

You have to balance the man hours and outlays for supplies versus just paying someone to do it

Thinking about it more, almost every printer will do double sided printing (it might be a manual flip though).

If one side of the cards is always the same (i.e. not unique) and the other side has the individual's name / ID# etc, that makes things a LOT simpler. You would just print out a batch of the non-customised ID's with a blank ID side, then when you need to generate cards,that would be your printer stock.

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

Screw the big guy, handwrite it all, in cursive. That'll show em.

ideally this would be it. i'm in kenya, so the "printing company" is a dude with a photocopier and a paper cutter. . . but i am definitely going to ask.

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____________________________________
https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

well, they do in fact all need to be printed at once. basically we're conducting a census and are handing each person an ID card (with their particulars penciled in, and then run through the laminator) after they've been counted. we'll have two teams counting simultaneously, so it's important that the individual ID#s be printed on the card in advance to keep things straight.

mainly i'm worried about 2-sided printing because in order for it to work, the two sides need to be printed precisely opposite each other on the sheet - if the cards on the front were offset by a half inch from the ones on the back, we'd be in trouble. and they've got to fit the laminating sleeve! stuff here usually doesn't work out to tidily so i'm always inclined to the most 'basic' solutions.

the fold+laminate method avoids that, but uses twice as much paper and adds a step. . .

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____________________________________
https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

MS office is not a prepress application. This should be done in vector (Illustrator, Fireworks, Inkscape, etc...). I don't know that those applications have the ability to increment a serial number though.

Get in touch with a printer and ask what it'd take. I worked in graphics (well web design; all my coworkers were graphics prepress types) and I don't know how to do this. (I do know how not to do this!) I'd ask a printer.

Edit:

>>> i'm in Kenya,

Oh well then. Your best bet would be to do it in inkscape or similar (inkscape is open source, go try it) and find a way to get serials in there in an automated way. Look at macros or scripts. Lay down as many ID cards as can fit on one page. You'll want two different documents for front and back. Export them into PDF. Anyone can open and print PDFs. Print one page full of the IDs, then feed the paper back to the printer to print the other side (if you don't have a 2-sided printer). Experiment with one page until you get the alignments correct before committing to printing 10,000.

This!

Mail merges are tricky, but if you have one side that is not unique that simplifies things. If you set up that side so it can deal with printing not being perfectly aligned it should work - give yourself wide margins just in case.

If you set up an excel spreadsheet for your data you can do the sequential numbering in a column with a simple calculation.

To prevent headaches make sure the data sheet only contains data - row 1 is your headers and row 2 is the first data point. If you have blank rows at the top or a title it will mess things up.

That's a given. Only one side will have the serial. The other side will be static. The way I see it he's got a few challenges:

Find an application that will do prepress vector and has the ability to script an incrementing number. Okay googled this and yes there's is a way to do that in inkscape:

http://www.inkscapeforum.com/...lit=increment#p68987

Make sure the front and back of the print line up so when the sheet is cut into individual IDs the cuts make sense front and back.

Let's say you can fit 30 ID cards on a page. You can then create a 100 page document with incrementing numbers to get 3000 IDs. Print that. Turn the paper around, feed it back to the printer. Then print the 1 page document containing the other side and tell the computer to print 100 copies. Cut. Laminate if you want. Done.

Do test the front and back alignment before printing 100 pages. ;)

wow. . . this is looking to be a bit of a job.

now just translate those instructions in swahili for me and i'll pop down to the printers . . .

-mike

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____________________________________
https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

If you don't have a budget, MS Word will do that. You would simply set up the Excel spreadsheet / database so it has the the incrementing numbers from 1 to whatever. If you want the numbers to have a certain number of digits, write a function that will allow you to do that.

As you add people to the database, periodically save the excel worksheet and print from Word whichever ID's you need printed, in small batches. You don't have to print everything. Can even set it up so that as the ID's are printed, a field "printed" is set from No to Yes. That would be a manual process.

edit: I'm assuming that there's no budget for any of this stuff, which is why you're asking us....

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly