Avery Personal Label Printer. (Evaluation)
by Dana Stoll

The Avery Personal Label Printer is a secretary's dream. If you're not actually a secretary but you only function as one for your family or some charitable organization, you'll still love this machine.

In my experience, professional-looking printed labels are almost more trouble than they're worth. Setting up those labels (which almost always come off inside the printer) and getting them to print at the right place (before you use up all you have) add up to one big headache. If I only have one label to print, it's often handwritten. Save a headache, sacrifice an impression. But at last there is a low-cost solution to this dilemma: the Avery Personal Label Printer! This little machine (only six inches tall and four inches wide), along with its accompanying software, takes the hassle out of labels. It takes only 3 1/2 seconds to produce laser-printed labels with a 137-dpi resolution. That makes for good-looking labels! It's so easy to use that you couldn't get it to jam even if you tried to operate it before the first jolt of morning java. You stick the labels on the spindle, drop the spindle in the machine, and stick the end of the labels in the only possible place to put it. The machine feeds itself. There are only two buttons: power and form feed.

Another groundbreaking simplification by the folks at Avery is the software included in this package: Label Pro and Personal Label Printer. Label Pro lets you design labels and store the formats to use time and time again.

REVIEWS

It's just detailed enough to give you all the choices you need (scalable fonts, the ability to add PCX clip art or other graphics, and templates for all types of Avery labels) and simple enough to use within ten minutes of booting it up. Personal Label Printer is a hot-key program that lets you print a label from wherever you are in your computer files. Let's say you're typing a letter in WordPerfect or XyWrite and you want to print a label. Just hit the hot key to activate the program, highlight the address, and print. To add icing to the cake, both of these programs give you the option of printing a postal bar code or code 39 on your label.

This is a first-class printer, and it does a first-class job. Paper-shuffling office work is time-consuming enough; anything that makes it simpler rates high in my book. The world needs more simple ideas that work well; it's the simplicity of this machine and these programs that makes me a fan.