Synchronizing a sheet of custom labels -- Writer 7.4.2.3

Most of the topics I found that discuss this problem seem to be for earlier versions of Writer, so I’m going to bring it up again.

I have sheets of odd-sized labels for which Avery doesn’t have a template. So this morning I set about building my own custom template using the New>Labels menu. The Labels dialog box is very well put together and quite intuitive, so it wasn’t hard to get the labels set up properly. I was careful to check the “Synchronize” box on the third tab and then clicked the “New Document” button in the lower right. Writer very nicely created a page that had my label filled in over all the labels on the page. Nice! :slight_smile:

Now I have two problems.

  1. I need to modify the font and appearance of the labels. I did this on the first (upper left) label and then expected (as was demonstrated in the how-to video I watched) to see a button for synchronizing my changes to all the other labels. That button doesn’t exist. At least, not for me. I haven’t been able to find that feature in the menus, either. So, how do I synchronize these changes over all the labels on my page?

  2. I would like to be able to return to the original Labels dialog box to make some tweaks to the size of the fields in my new template. I can’t seem to find, in the menus, any way to pull that dialog box back up. How do I do that?

Thanks for your help!

The attached biblio_labels_frames.odt (18.0 KB) contains some test labels based on the “Bibliography” database which is shipped with LibreOffice. When I open it, I’m prompted for updating “external links” which is misleading because the links in that document are not external ones.
After loading the document, I see the “Synchronize” toolbar with a single push button “Synchronize Labels”.
In addition, I can open the dialog menu:Edit>“External Links…”, select all the entries (Ctrl+A) and click “Update”.
The “external” links reference the top-left frame from the other ones.

That worked. Kind of a clumsy way to have to go about it, but it got the job done.

No, I don’t see a Synchronize toolbar. Thanks for trying, though.

Well, it is not a toolbar. It does not appear in menu:View>Toolbars, it does not appear in menu:Tools>Customize>Toolbars, and it looks a bit different from regular toolbars. It seems to be a little dialog window with a push button. Why your LibreOffice fails to show that little dialog is beyond my knowledge. For now, you should store your label document for further use and use the dialog for external links after changing the label content of the first label. When the size and layout changes, let the wizard create a new label document. Copy the label content of the old document into the first label frame of the new document and synchronize.

So, @Villeroy helped me with question #1 and I am now able to update all the labels on my page. However, I still have found no way to go back and tweak the size parameters. That’s question #2. Could someone, please, help me with that? Thanks!

Most important thing with User defined labels is to save them. You can then edit a new set of labels and resave. If you create a new label now the settings will probably be still there so you can save them with suitable name and description

Create your new labels and copy the first of your previous labels and paste into the new layout. The fields should copy over.
To change the text size of existing labels you can modify the paragraph style. If all are a copy of the master label then they will all have the same paragraph style.

Your suggestions helped and I was able to print my labels just fine. Thanks everyone for your help!

All the solutions above seem a bit ugly. It took me a while to find it(and i’m on 7.6.7.2), but

Tools>Update>Update All

synchronizes the labels.

Version: 7.6.7.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 60(Build:2)
CPU threads: 8; OS: Linux 6.5; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Ubuntu package version: 4:7.6.7-0ubuntu0.23.10.3
Calc: threaded