Rosie's Reviews

By Sandra Rosenzweig
     
      Going Postal
      The Dymo LabelWriter Twin Turbo printer gets a stamp of approval.
      Our gardener, the Greatest Gardener in the Whole World, mails his bills with stamps featuring plants or conservation (or both). A local real estate agent sends out her bills with historical stamps on them. I love looking at these stamps, and sometimes I even save them, but I still need a supply of adhesive stamps, the rolls that fit into one of those plastic dispensers the post office sells, or the stickers that come out of a postage meter. I don't want to run to the post office every week for more postage (or to get the meter topped up). It would be great to be able to buy postage on the Web and use it immediately. Still, I haven't been able to bring myself to switch to a postage machine?they are expensive and the stamps so very ugly.
      Dymo, which popularized the embossed-plastic labeler in the late fifties, has teamed up with Endicia, an Internet postage service licensed by the U.S. Postal Service to sell postage online. The Dymo LabelWriter Twin Turbo printer ($189) produces both labels and the world's ugliest stamps. How ugly? These adhesive stickers look like USPS parcel address labels, but with a pink border on two edges. You can open an online Endicia account and buy, say, $10 worth of postage. You don't need to specify denominations. Just $10 of postage to do with as you will. Then whenever you have to mail something, you bring up the Dymo Stamps program on your computer, and it connects to the Net and updates your account, lest you've forgotten what your balance is. Lay your letter on the accompanying Dymo USB Postal Scale (handles packages up to five pounds) and the device wakes up the printer. The printer's software then launches onto your screen, showing you the amount of postage needed and waiting for your OK. Then, guess what? It prints out your postage. You remove the backing, stick the stamp onto your letter, and then forget to mail the thing, as usual.
      When you first set up your postage station, you insert the label roll onto either of the machine's two spindles, and the stamp roll ... oh, you know. Then, in the label and stamp properties windows, you tell the program which goes where. The labels aren't much prettier than the stamps, but then, you're running a business here, not an art gallery.
      Oops. Forgot to address the envelope, which means I gotta launch the Dymo Label program. (The two halves of this labeling application are not very well integrated. If Dymo can't combine the two programs in one printing screen, it should at least give you the option to open both with a single command.) Once the label program is open, you can type in the address and then choose a font, design template, circular text path, your logo, and a postal bar code. Or just press the print button.
      The first time I booted up the programs, they couldn't find the Dymo printer. So, being me, I installed it manually: Start, Control Panel, Printers and Faxes, Add Printer. When the Welcome to the Add Printer Wizard screen opened, I clicked on Next, then "Local printer attached to this computer," and "Automatically detect and install my Plug and Play printer." Then I clicked on Next. My Wizard couldn't detect any Plug and Play printers, so I clicked on Next again, selected the LPT printer port and Next, then scrolled down the left column of the manufacturer list until I found Dymo. Then I chose the Twin Turbo printer from the list on the right. If the Wizard had found previously installed printer drivers, I would have told it to use the new one, given the printer a name, and deselected "Use this printer" as the default printer. Now, if I had been you instead of me, I would have just uninstalled and reinstalled the program and drivers.
      If you want your Microsoft Outlook address book to work inside the Dymo Label program, you'll have to export it in a special format (as a comma-separated value file) and then import it into the Dymo app, with all the mistakes and misinterpretations such an export-import process can make. On the other hand, if you are using just about any Microsoft Office program, you can just highlight, say, the address block in the heading of your letter and click on the little Dymo printer icon in the Word, Outlook, or Excel toolbar-and there's your label, waiting for you to hit the print button. That's pretty slick. So, rather than importing all those addresses, you can just select a name in Outlook Contacts.
      The first time I did this, I happened to select the record of a man with no address listed. All I got on the label was his name. The second time (and every subsequent time), I selected a name with data in many fields, only some of which were address fields. But not to worry, the software parsed the fields and gave me a correctly completed address label. The Dymo label and stamp printer may not turn out works of art, but it certainly provides a speedy way to mail things and, for the agoraphobic, an excuse not to leave the office.
     

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