Label Planet
In part 1, we explain how troublesome templates can go wrong.
This is the first post in a three part series about troublesome label templates. This post starts by taking a closer look at the different ways that templates can go wrong.
When templates “go wrong”, there is usually a specific cause and effect happening. Our “Troubleshooting Label Templates” series should help you to identify the effect, determine the cause, and apply the relevant fix.
For many people, designing and printing label templates is not something that they are familiar with so, when something goes wrong, it can feel like a major disaster. Some people spend hours trying different things to fix the problem, others give up, while some decide that the template isn’t working because it is “wrong” – often without making an attempt to work out what is wrong.
At Label Planet, we have carefully created our own set of label templates for customers to use – and each one has been thoroughly tested to ensure that it can produce a set of perfectly printed labels. However, because there are so many elements involved in printing labels, there are plenty of factors that can introduce problems and turn your template troublesome.
So, the first thing you need to do is identify the effect – i.e. what has gone wrong with your template.
Troubleshooting Label Templates – Troubles Before You Print
Sometimes label templates can be troublesome from the start. While there are a variety of problems that can occur, we find the following to be the most commonly reported by Label Planet customers:
- Unable to open a label template
- Unable to edit a label template
- Word label templates don’t show the (correct) outline of each label
- Word label templates split onto two pages
- Unable to position images / shapes / text boxes in Word label templates
- Word label templates automatically resize after adding content
Troubleshooting Label Templates – Troubles After You Print
Watch a video: this advice is also available in video format.
View our step by step How To video to learn how to work out what is going wrong with misaligned label templates.
Of course, even if your label templates look absolutely perfect on your screen, this doesn’t mean that the printed result will be the same. After you press print, there are two main groups of problems that can occur – print quality and print alignment – along with a third possible problem in the form of an absence of print.
- PRINT QUALITY: these problems relate to the quality of the print itself. Common examples included faint print, print that smears or flakes away, and ghosting (where faint replicas of your design appear across the sheet).
- PRINT ALIGNMENT: these problems relate to the positioning of your designs on your labels. Most misalignment problems follow one of two patterns where a) all of your designs are misaligned in the SAME direction by the SAME amount or b) the misalignment gets gradually worse as you look down/across/out from the centre of the sheet.
- ABSENT PRINT: in these cases, a section (or sections) of a label (or labels) are not printed.
Once you’ve identified what has gone wrong (effect), you can then move on to trying to figure out why your template has gone wrong (cause).