How to Create Your Own Printable Word Strips

OK. so if you’ve ever looked at my digital work, you know that I’m a SUCKER for using word strips in my Project Life pages. Although digital kits include a ton of fun sayings that I can leverage, often a kit I’m using doesn’t include exactly the right sentiment I’m looking for. I am notorious for making my own in coordinating digital card stock and font styles… but this year, as I headed back to the physical scrapbooking world to create my own December daily, I knew I had to bulk up on my word strips without just typing away in PhotoShop on my layout as I went. I wanted to create a BUNCH of word strips in my chosen color scheme and I wanted them on sticker backing to speed assembly.

Once I started, I kind of got excited about it (like I do about everything), and created over 220 word strips (over 3 full printed pages worth)!  I KNOW that you all can do this too - I used MS Word and MS Excel just to keep things simple for those that want to follow along.  I’ll include the steps that I took to do this, but keep in mind that I have a Mac so some of the screens and steps may be a BIT different on a Windows Operating System. I didn’t give full on step-by-step instructions because the labels that YOU use will be different than the labels I came up with.

STEP 1: Identify Your Page Prompts. 

Since I’m doing this for a December Daily album, I wanted to plan in advance what each page/day topic will be about so that my word strips will coordinate. Here’s what I selected for my album this year:

1. Nativity
2. Christmas Decorations
3. Favorite Christmas Songs
4. Homestead Gardens
5. Santa
6. The Weather
7. Wish Lists
8. Shopping
9. Ornaments
10. Red
11. Traditions
12. Silver and Gold
13. The Christmas Tree
14. Outside Lights
15. Stockings
16. Hot Chocolate
17. Baking Cookies
18. Favorite Holiday Movies
19. See What I See, Hear what I hear, know what I know
20. Wrapping 
21. Christmas Cards
22. Family
23. The Food
24. Excitement (Dec. 23)
25. Christmas Eve
26. Christmas Day
27. The Day After Christmas
28. Recap - Favorite Gifts
29. Gratitude
30. Looking Ahead at the New  Year (Resolutions)
31. Plans for NYE

STEP 2: Come Up with Word Strip Phrases. 

Once I selected these categories, I tried to come up with phrases that I wanted to create word strips for in each daily page prompt. I typed each of these phrases into a single column in a spreadsheet in MS Excel, one phrase per row, leaving NO BLANK ROWS (I used Column A. I gave my column the name “LABEL” in cell A1 for sorting later in this instructions. My first word strip phrase was in cell A2. my second phrase in cell A3 and so on.).

STEP 2 b: Add Miscellaneous Word Strips. 

I also came up with other “Christmas-ey” word strip phrases that I just knew I’d want to use, but that didn’t specifically match a particular category and added these to the bottom of my list in Column A (Again leaving NO BLANK ROWS between phrases).

STEP 3: Sort Your Word Strip Phrases by Length. 

OK, all of you that get scared the moment we get a bit technical, it’s time to put on your big girl panties! ;) Now we’re going to use an Excel function that allows us to determine how long each phrase that we selected is so that we can fit our word strips together effectively in columns without one LONG phrase making short phrases in the SAME column have a LOT of blank space on that word strip. Essentially, we want all the long phrases to be together in the same column in our final product.

STEP 3 a. Title Column B.

Give column B the name ‘LENGTH’ by typing this into cell B1.

Step 3 b. Calculate the Length of the Word Strip Phrase in cell A2. 

In cell B2, type ‘=LEN(A2)’ and press the return/enter key. A number should now appear in cell A2 that equals the number of characters (letters/numbers/etc.) that are in the phrase that you have typed in cell A2.

Step 3 c. Calculate the Length of all the other word strip phrases you typed.  

Click on cell B2 once. Hold your mouse over the lower right hand corner of cell B2. You might have to move around a bit until your cursor now looks like an all-black cross.  Now double click. The formula should replicate itself all the way down column B for every word strip phrase you have typed.

STEP 4: Turn on Auto Filters for your Columns. 

Click the gray Column Headers ‘A’ and ‘B’ to highlight them both (holding down the shift key as you click each column to keep them both highlighted).

Select Data—>Filter—>Autofilter from the menu bar. Little up and down arrows should appear at the top of each column on the right in cell A1 and B1.

Click the little up and down arrow next to LENGTH in cell B2, and choose to sort ‘Descending’ so that your longest phrases are first.

STEP 5-1,000: Begin Pulling things into Microsoft Word columns, and Adjust as Needed.

Now comes the part that takes a bit of time: We’re going to pull all of these Excel phrases into Microsoft Word into a customized table.

To make things easier for myself to cut and paste, I moved things around in Excel a bit first. I took my big long list of 221 word strip phrases that were sorted by length, and split them into columns containing 25 words a piece by copying and pasting cells so that columns d-g of my spreadsheet contained a bunch of my phrases for example.  I expanded the columns so I could see my full phrases by double clicking on the right hand side of each grey column letter header (ex - double-clicking the line between ‘D’ and ‘E’ when your mouse looks like a black vertical line with black arrows coming off of it pointing to the left and right).

I tried moving my columns into MS word (three columns of my longest phrases) but since the phrases were so long, the columns were too wide and went off the page. There was also a LOT of white / dead space. I decided to match up some of my shortest phrases with some of my longest phrases so that they “fit” better on the page by taking the LAST 25 from my list and putting them in column E next to my longest 25 phrases before copying and pasting them into MS Word.  My columns then looked something like this (sorry, I didn't save this part so can't show you the original!):

I then selected and copied some of my cells (4 columns by 25 rows of data) and pasted them into a new file in Microsoft Word document (with the narrowest printing margins possible - for help with how to do this, go here).

I then selected the table properties for this new table by hovering over it and right clicking on the little blue box with arrows in four directions in the top left corner (see top left of this screenshot)

and selecting table properties. Click the options button on the lower right, and set the default cell margins to 0.07” on the top, bottom, left, and right and select OK.

Next, I centered all the text in the table, I changed the font and font sizes for each of my word strips as much as I wanted to, and then I played around with the sizing of the individual cells. Some cells had a LOT of extra white space so I clicked on the left hand side of the cell to highlight it in blue, right clicked, and chose to split the cell.

I split these type of cells into 2 columns, 1 row,

and then added a second ‘short’ phrase to the “new” cell to fit in.  If this starts to make one of your phrases wrap onto two lines, you can adjust the width of a single cell individually without affecting the rest of the column by selecting the cell you would like to adjust by clicking in the left code of the cell (which highlights it in blue) and then hovering over the line on the right hand side of the cell that lies between the current cell and the next one over until the cursor becomes a black vertical line with 2 black arrows coming off of it pointing to the left and right. Click and drag to adjust that dividing line.

I did this line by line, row by row and repeated this for all my remaining labels.

Then I adjusted background color and text color for each cell to Correspond to the color scheme I was going for. To change background color for a cell, highlight the cell and right click. Select ‘Borders and Shading’. It gives you a set of (ugly) swatch colors to pick from, but you can select your own custom color by clicking the ‘more colors’ button,

selecting the color sliders button up at the top of the color panel (looks like a red bar and a green bar with sliders on them), and selecting RGB Sliders from the drop down menu, and then typing in whatever RGB value you want.

(you could also just use the color picker, but I’m obsessive with color matching and actually get the RGB values of the products I’m using by using the color picker in photoshop on a photograph of my kit products so I can match the color scheme exactly.

Once you’ve typed in your RGB value, the color you’re going for should appear in that big box next to the little search symbol at the top of the colors panel. click on this and drag it to the bottom of the screen just above the OK button to add this color to your ‘swatches’ so that you don’t have to re-enter the RGB value EVERY TIME you want a red label for instance. :)

Then next time you come in and want to make another cell this same color, you can just select this color from the swatches panel at the bottom of this color panel (see how I have cream, gold, red, teal, green etc. swatches just above my OK and cancel buttons on the Colors panel? those are all my custom colors).

When I was finally finished adjusting word strip width, background color, fonts, etc., I printed my word strips on Avery 1/2 page labels that look like this.

I left a blank row in my table where the two 5.5x8.5 inch labels ‘cut’ the page in half so that my word strips weren’t cut through the middle. Now I can cut out each ‘word strip’ as I need it to use in my final project, or use a strip or block of them all together if I chose to.

I know that this description of my steps has a lot of ‘wiggle room’ since you’ll be using your own phrases and there are a lot of variables with column width and phrase length, etc., so if you have questions as you try to go through this yourself, let me know! I’m happy to help anyone who gets stuck!

Let me know if it DOES work for you too. I’d love to see what you create!