How mylabelmaker.com helped me make product labels from Google Sheets

Nick from Huisman Tricot was looking for a tool to make product labeling easier at their textile shop. In the following article, he describes how they use mylabelmaker to turn their product spreadsheet into labels, whether they need a full batch or just selected products.

• The shopHuisman Tricot, a textile shop with a full product range to label.
• The dataEvery article and its EAN code already lives in one Google Sheet.
• The jobFind one product, or a few, and print just the labels and copies needed.

Our product list is in Google Sheets. I work at Huisman Tricot, a textile shop, and what I wanted was fairly straightforward: use that spreadsheet as a database for our articles and products, find a product by its EAN, and print the product labels I needed.

Not necessarily every product in the spreadsheet. Sometimes just one.

That sounds like a small distinction, but it was the main thing I was trying to solve. Having a product list is useful. Being able to search for a specific EAN and print only the label linked to that row is what would make it useful for this job.

I wasn’t looking for another place to maintain the same product information. I wanted a practical way to work with the information already in the sheet.

Looking for product labels from Google Sheets

I came across mylabelmaker while searching for a way to use Google Sheets with ZebraDesigner 3.

The first thing I liked was the design. It was clean and intuitive. When you’re experimenting with software, that makes a difference. You want to understand whether it can do the job, rather than spend all your attention figuring out where everything is.

My first impression was positive, but there was something missing from the workflow I wanted.

I could see how to print the rows from a spreadsheet. What I wanted was to find one particular article—by searching for its EAN, for example—and print just that label.

A spreadsheet might contain your whole product range. That doesn’t mean you need labels for the whole range every time you open it.

A feature request that became an update the same day

I emailed the developer to ask about searching and selecting individual rows.

He explained that mylabelmaker had originally been built for his cousin, and that he was adding features as people requested them. He said he would add searching and filtering, along with a way to print the label currently displayed on the canvas.

Later that same day, he emailed to say the update was live.

I had described a fairly specific requirement, and the conversation had already moved from whether it was possible to an update I could try.

Nick, Huisman Tricot

That responsiveness stood out. It also brought up the next question: quantities.

Finding a product by EAN, then choosing label copies

Suppose we have twenty pieces of the same product. Finding its record in the spreadsheet is useful, but I don’t want to repeat the print action twenty times.

I wanted to enter “20” and print twenty copies of that product’s label.

Then there was the next variation: what if I selected two products and needed twenty labels for each?

That’s forty labels, but only two records from the dataset. The distinction between the number of selected products and the number of copies matters.

I sent those suggestions back to the developer.

He explained the updated printing options: the individual-label action would ask for the number of copies, and the main print action would use the selected rows and ask for copies per row. There was an individual-label printing option in the row-editing pane too.

That was much closer to the workflow I had in mind.

Selected rows or a full batch from one spreadsheet

What interested me was being able to use the same dataset in different ways.

Sometimes you need labels for a whole batch. Sometimes you only need a few selected articles. Sometimes you’re looking for one EAN and want several copies of that one label.

You shouldn’t need to rebuild the product list for each of those situations.

Once the data fields are connected to a label layout, the idea is to prepare the next run in a few clicks: choose the records, set the quantity and check what you’re about to print.

For an illustrative textile example, imagine the same article in several colours or sizes. You might need twenty labels for one variant and twenty for another, without printing anything for the remaining variants.

The useful part isn’t simply printing lots of labels. It’s having control over which labels are included.

Nick, Huisman Tricot

One small safeguard I still wanted

After discussing those additions, I had another suggestion: an option to start with no rows selected.

My concern was accidental printing. If someone opens a large product list and forgets to deselect the other rows, they could send far more labels to the printer than intended.

I would rather deliberately select the products needed for that job.

That was my next request, rather than an update I had confirmation of. It’s also why I’d check the selection before starting a run instead of assuming the default was right.

It might sound like a small detail compared with the label designer or barcode features. But for the way I wanted to use the software, it was part of making the workflow dependable.

Why mylabelmaker caught my attention

What impressed me was the combination of a straightforward interface and a developer who listened to the actual job I was trying to do.

My request wasn’t especially complicated: keep the product information in Google Sheets, find an article by EAN, and choose which labels—and how many copies—to print.

But those details are the difference between a label designer and something that could fit into our working day.

I didn’t need another product database. I needed a better way to use the one we already had.

Nick, Huisman Tricot

That’s what made mylabelmaker worth exploring.

Print product labels from your own Google Sheet

Want to try the same setup? It takes a few minutes with the sheet you already have.

1. Open https://app.mylabelmaker.com. No signup.
2. In Google Sheets, go to File, Share, Publish to the web, and pick Comma-separated values (.csv). Copy the link.
3. In the app, click Data on the right and paste that link in the Google Sheet tab.
4. Open Variables and click the product name, size, and price columns to put them on the label.
5. Add a barcode and set it to EAN-13. With the barcode selected, click your EAN column in Variables.
6. Open Edit row, find the EAN you need, and tick the rows you want to print.
7. Click Print and enter the copies per row, or use Print this for the label on the canvas.