Can I print multiple Publisher files onto the same sheet of paper?

Soldato
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I've got to make ID badges for most of my colleagues as well as at least 40 ID badges for the Sixth Form students. We make our ID badges in Publisher and print them off before laminating them and putting them in a badge holder with a lanyard. Previously, I've only ever had to 1 or 2 ID badges at a time so I wasn't that concerned with wasting paper. However I will be doing at least 70 ID badge print outs from Publisher and I can't work out how to print more than one badge per page. I know how to print multiple copies of the same badge but, for obvious reasons, I don't want to have say 20 copies of the same badge on one sheet of A4.

I've googled and can't find anything much beyond some mail merge-esque solution which seems to take too long to set up.

I have a feeling that the only answer would be to make one massive Publisher file with each page in that file being a different/distinct ID badge for each colleague. I would then normally print out one page of the Publisher file but for my current job I would print out each page/ID badge onto A4.

So is it possible or am I resigned to wasting a lot of paper? TIA. :)
 
this, or be a man and do it properly in something like Adobe Illustrator.
If only. :) We haven't the budget for it. I am a big fan of doing things properly, not cheaply. I do the Leavers book each year and have done so since I first started my current job. Initially I was given Serif PagePlus by my ex-boss. It was 3-4 years out of date then and was given to the school for free by Serif trying to promote their software. For the Leavers just gone, this July, I went back to Publisher as I have Publisher 2010 and it was so much more modern and easier to get what I wanted than PagePlus from 2005!

Is it possible to get Adobe stuff like Illustrator for educational prices for me to use on my work PC? I could also do with Photoshop, Lightroom and Premiere Pro for editing photos, storing/cataloguing photos and editing videos. I think that I have a small chance of convincing my boss that if we got Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere Pro and Illustrator that I create multimedia that is of better quality than anything I can do now. If only the price was right! :p
 
I usually use mail merge for this kind of thing, its not really that long winded, you just:

1) have a publisher document with none of the details added (just a single id with the document size set correctly for the id size, ie not A4)
2) an excel spreadsheet with a list of all the details you want different per id (remember to put header names in the first row, eg "NAME", "DATE")
3) pick mail merge from publisher
4) tell it which excel file to use
5) pick where you want each of the bits of data from the excel document to go (these use the headers from the excel spreadsheet, using the examples above "<<NAME>>", "<<DATE>>".
6) change print options in publisher so it prints multiple pages per sheet (you probably need to mess with the margin sizes here a bit)

Having the stuff listed out in excel is much easier than trying to copy and paste per id, you can just update the excel document each time you need to print a new set of ids then.
 
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