Bar Codes

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INTRO

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Welcome to the quick guide of making Bar codes. Making bar code labels is easier than it looks. Basically scrolling through and looking at the pictures is pretty much enough to get an idea of how to do everything. Just don't forget the very important last step of erasing the invisible paragraph bar code character (look at last few figures to see what I mean).

You can click on any picture to see a zoomed in version of it.

ERRATA

Bar codes sometimes include dashes: Don't always be ready to jump the gun thinking that the barcode only consists of a number, it may include dashes. When matching up a product number which looked something like "PT-500000-4321" I found that this barcode included the dashes. When making your bar code, note what characters are in the bar code itself. I highly recommend you get a barcode scanner, use a webcam as a barcode scanner, or compare the output of the barcode you get in Excel to a package that already has the bar code on it.

QUICK GUIDE

FIRST STEP (Download/Install font)
Get the bar code font that you need. You can Google "code 3 of 9 free," for example. A link is provides on the page.
http://www.squaregear.net/fonts/free3of9.shtml
The installation process is easy. Simply drag and drop the ttf files into the fonts directory in Control Panel.

1 - Search for files

2 - Uncompress files

3 - Install by dragging and dropping into fonts folder.

SECOND STEP (Get your source data ready)
Your source data should be organized by columns. UPC codes should be in on column, product number in another. This also varies from company to company. If you sell one product, the UPC code is going to be the same for each item. So it doesn't necessarily require you to make a column for it. You can specify the UPC code in the Microsoft word.
Also you have to consider preserving the original data, just in case someone before you screwed up. So for example, your given a bunch of MAC addresses for your product, each MAC has hyphens or colons in it segmenting every 2 characters, you can specify in another column to remove that hyphen or Colon. The following code accomplishes this for Cell B2 referencing A2
"=LEFT(A2,2)&RIGHT(LEFT(A2,5),2)&RIGHT(LEFT(A2,8),2)&RIGHT(LEFT(A2,11),2)&RIGHT(LEFT(A2,14),2)&RIGHT(LEFT(A2,17),2)"

Reading contents of cell A2, and removing colons.

THIRD STEP (Preview your data)
Bar code data is a numerical value enclosed with asterisks '*'.
So in one column (the column you will reference) you should have just your numerical value. In another Column, you should should put an asterisk enclosed in double quotes, an ampersand, the reference cell, and another asterisk enclosed in double quotes. Last thing to do here is to change the font to the bar code font.
i.e.
A2 contains 00-44-55-66-77-88
Using the formula earlier, B2 displays 004455667788
Now C2 contains the code: ="*"&B2&"*"
This will display the numerical value in B2 again, but this time with the askerisk enclosing it. So it looks like this: *004455667788*
Lastly you simple change the font, I use "free 3 of 9".

1 - Column C will have font "free 3 of 9"

2 - Code for displaying bar code with asterisk enclosing

3 - Final result

FOURTH STEP (Import data)
This applies to 2003 and 2007
Once everything is said and done now it's time to close your Excel sheet and use Word.
This part of the text tutorial won't get in to much detail. I find this interface to be user friendly, so I'll keep it generic.
Access the labels section in Microsoft Word. Go to options and click create new label. Input specifications like size of the page and the size of the label.
In the mail mergers setting, make sure labels is enabled to have that handy update/refresh values button.
The new record should be in every label after the first one. Edit the first one the way you want it to look, use the beautiful refresh button, sit back and relax.

1 - To start making labels go to mailing tab, click start mail merge, and select labels.

2 - Select the type of label you want. You can customize by clicking details.

3 - Fields are basically self explanatory.

Vertical and Horizontal pitch refer to gaps (supposedly).

4 - After click the blue okay in the above figure, you are now on this table design page.

5 - Time to select your data. Choose the excel Workbook your extracting data from

6 - Specify the sheet where your going to get data from

7 - Now a next record rule should be in every column and the update labels button should be enabled.

8 - Select the columns with the information that you need to display.

9 - You can now see the data inputted into the cell. After you click the update labels button all the cells will have the information propogated.

10 - You can click the preview button on the top right to preview your labels

11 - Change the font to see the bar code.

12 - Result of changing Font, your almost done.

13 - If you don't want to get fired for mislabeling all the packages you better look at this!

14 - The paragraph character here is recognized as a bar code character, you need to make this character go back to being invisible. Basically switch the font for this one character from being "free 3 of 9" to anything else.

Character is once again invisible yay!

Video Series

The following is a five part series discussing how to make bar codes in Microsoft Excel and Word. The series was originally a 3 part series. After seeing that the series accumulated almost up to 30 minutes of video, I wanted one quick overview video for a user who was moderately proficient with Word and Excel.
The overview is about 5 minutes and gives you a good idea of everything you need to know. Also, I put in an Errata video that addresses some tips and mistakes.

::: Super quick overview video:::