It’s the annual “painstakingly write out a ton of Christmas cards and mail them” time of the year again, however this year I’ve set out (and succeeded) to make Erin’s life a little easier.

You see, I found this fantastic article that described how one could simply export a Google contacts list to CSV and use the Avery Designer Pro (I’m using the mac version) to map the columns from the export to generate the labels.  This sounded incredibly easy, and so I set out to try to simplify our Christmas card mailing process…

After blindly following the guide (see above), I quickly realized there was a huge issue – Google does not do anything to ensure the resulting CSV file is formatted properly.  While there are many, many columns in the CSV export (including individual fields for the various components of an address), Google has taken the easy way out and simply filled in the “formatted” address column along with all of the line breaks occurring from typing the address in.  The end result was the Avery software printing out 2 (or more) separate labels for every contact, with their address being split across them.  So, I decided to fix the CSV file.

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