Using the Label Designer and Avery Labels

CMMS enables you to create and edit labels using the Label Designer.

1. Create Print Labels

To access this, go to the left navigation bar, click the ‘…’ icon and select ‘Printout Templates’.

This will open the relevant module.

Here, you can edit or delete older templates by clicking the relevant icons in the last column. You can also create a new template by clicking on ‘Add Print Label Template’. This can be done for both items and bundles.

Before we get into that, let’s see what the Label Designer does:

State of the art, drag-and-drop based designer. Just grab the data box and move it to the canvas below.
The choice of inserting QRCodes, Barcodes or both on the label to use with our mobile device based scanning feature.
All of an asset’s pre-defined fields can be printed on the asset label.
Similarly, all custom attributes (text, date, paragraph) are available for printing on the asset label.
Apply rich formatting to data fields (by double-clicking on the field’s data box)
Insert free-form text and easily apply styles like fonts, alignment, size, and rotation.
Ability to insert your company logo into the label.

1.1 Layout and Design

On opening the print label template, you will see multiple layout options. You can choose the paper size, margins, and the space you’d like to leave between labels.

You can also change label dimensions by sliding the width and height scale around or inputting them manually. By default, the measurement unit is set to inches. However, you can shift to using centimeters if you wish. To do so, go to Company Settings → Company Profile → Standards and Formats → Length unit and select centimeters.

Scrolling down, you will find the designer itself. Simply drag the fields and arrange them onto the label as you see fit. The following screenshot shows a newly designed template for a label. It includes a QR Code, the company logo, asset number, name, description, as well as a rotated text box. You can also add a URL if you like.

How do you style an element? Double-click an element to resize or change its style. A dialogue box for settings will show up.

Resize canvas to fit small labels: In a scenario where a user wants to fit all the elements/text boxes for all the fields he/she wants, it becomes difficult to do this in a nicely aligned manner. To tackle this, you can resize the view of the canvas, say keep it to 200% for a larger view (see image above). This will help you make small-sized labels seamlessly.

Note: Rotated pictures only show up as rotated once you click the ‘Preview’ or ‘Create’ buttons. It might seem like it is obscuring another label element (as shown below), but you can adjust the placement using the preview.

When previewed in the designer or rendered while printing, the label displays as shown in the image below.

1.2 Custom field on Print Label

Any custom field can be printed on a Print Label. Please note that for the custom field to appear on the label designer as an element, you have to go to the particular custom field, click ‘Edit’ and select the “Make available for print label” option.

You can also have a custom field shown when someone scans the QR Code for an asset. Enable Company Settings → Show on Public QR Code Page → Custom Fields.
Make sure to have the relevant preferences selected.

Learn more: Tracking Items using Custom fields

1.3 Color Tags in Print Labels

Label Designer now supports adding colors to labels. You can choose from 9 different colors and 2 shapes (rounds and bars). Pick the shapes from the list of available design elements on label designing canvas. Double click on a shape to change color.

This comes in handy when you quickly want to identify an item’s category by looking at the label. Say you want to use red tags for Nikon Cameras and blue for Sony Cameras. Have a print label template for red and other for blue. Use the red one to print labels for Nikon and blue for Sony.

1.4 Fitting Multiple Labels on a Page

You can also arrange and fit multiple labels on the same page. Select multiple assets from the ‘Assets Listing’ view, and choose ‘Print Label’ from the actions menu as shown below.

Another way to achieve the same effect is to disable ‘Single Step Printing’ from the Icon Bell → Print Queue. This allows you to ‘fill up’ the print queue before explicitly taking the print action on the print queue. This means you can put multiple labels on one page, and review them before you actually print them.

2. Third Party Labels

Sticky paper is great for a quick job on printing asset labels as well as doing a trial run before ordering the more expensive commercial grade labels (e.g. stickers or aluminum labels). Avery and Avery compatible sticky papers are commonly available at big box stores like Staples or OfficeMax. Moreover, most of the big box stores offer online printing services i.e. simply generate your labels from CMMS, and ‘send over’ the pdf file to the printing service online. Go to the store at your leisure and pick up your printed labels.

CMMS is compatible with Avery Labels, the most well known in the industry, and we offer quite a few Label-Avery templates. Refer to the end of this post for our most frequently used Avery templates.

3. Frequently Used Label Templates (Avery)

Here are some of the most popular Avery templates used by our customers. You will need to configure a new template by going to More → Printout Templates. You can now enter the template values in the margins and space fields.

There can be some cases where the label you’re designing is smaller than the area taken by the design elements placed on the canvas. You’d need to delete these elements (from the x on the top of every element) or re-size them. This is because the label cannot be smaller than the elements inside the label.

*The following values are in inches.

Avery Label Page Settings
Compatible Labels	6572, 6578, 6581	6570, 6576, 6590, 22828	15513, 5523	22805	22806, 22816, 22922, 22921, 22960	959064 (L7060)
Page Size	Letter (8.5×11.0)	Letter (8.5×11.0)	Letter (8.5×11.0)	Letter (8.5×11.0)	Letter (8.5×11.0)	A4 (8.27 x 11.69)
Top Margin	0.5000	0.5000	0.5000	0.5000	0.6300	0.5900
Left Margin	0.1875	0.5000	0.1666	0.7916	0.6300	0.2640
Space between labels – Left to right	0.1300	0.4000	0.1666	0.3125	0.6250	0.0980
Space between labels – Top to bottom	0.0000	0.2100	0.0000	0.2083	0.5800	0.0000
Label Width x Height	2.62×2.00	1.54×1.04	4.0×2.0	1.5×1.5	2.0×2.0	2.5×1.5

Check out this site for more accurate dimensions for Avery Labels.

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