Barcode Tutorials and FAQ for Microsoft Access, Word and Excel


Providing barcode tutorials, plug-ins, FAQs, integration and printing solutions for Microsoft Access, Excel, Word, FrontPage and other Office applications.

Reseller and Affiliate programs Priority Support and Upgrade Protection Contact IDAutomation License Agreements Report Software Piracy! More About IDAutomation Link To IDAutomation Links To Other Sites		Creating barcodes in Microsoft® Access™ can be a relatively easy task with IDAutomation products. IDAutomation has easy-to-use barcode plug-ins, macros and barcode fonts. The information provided here was created with the assumption that the user has a basic understanding of bar-coding, otherwise please review IDAutomation’s Barcoding for Beginners. The ActiveX Controls are Microsoft Office plug-ins that are easy-to-use. Using barcode fonts instead require adding the start and stop character or using IDAutomation MS Office Macros.
		Using the Barcode Plug-in:
		After purchasing or downloading the plug-in (which is called the ActiveX Control), it can be dragged, dropped and resized it on a form such as a report. In a Microsoft Access report in design mode, choose Insert - ActiveX control. Select the installed control starting with "IDAutomation", drop it on the form and resize the control as necessary. To change the properties of the control such as barcode height and symbology type, right click on the control and choose properties. To bind the control to a data source, enter the table and field or formula in the control source field as in the example above. Enter the table and field as in the example; do not just enter the field. The proper barcode will show up after the report is saved and run. The barcode will be created from the data in the control source field.
		Using Barcode Fonts in Access:
		Implementing barcode solutions with IDAutomation fonts provides a high level of scalability with operating systems, applications and printer independence. It should be noted that if the client is not a technical user or programmer, use the self-checking barcode fonts. Self-checking fonts (such as Code 39 and Codabar) have the checking code built-in so that it is unnecessary to calculate check characters. Check characters are used in more dense symbologies so the barcode scanner can verify the barcode was read correctly. However, to help technical users integrate barcodes into an application, IDAutomation does provide font automation tools such as the MS Office Macros to automatically format the start, stop and check characters to the barcode fonts. For information on these tools, please review the font automation tool site. Self-checking fonts are easy to use in Access as well as other applications and can be entered directly from the keyboard. All barcodes require start and stop characters and must be included in the barcode. Without the start and stop character in the barcode, the scanner does not know where the barcode starts or ends. For example, to create a barcode that encodes the data "1234ABCD" with the Code 39 Font: Select the font from the list of fonts in the application. Type the start character, in this case it is "!" . Type the data, in this case it is "1234ABCD" . Type the stop character, in this case it is "!"; and then change the font back to the default font of the document so other text typed in will be human readable. Automating the printing of self-checking fonts for an Access report is easy, just make sure the start and stop characters appear directly before and after the data in the barcode. For example, to print the Code 39 Fonts from a MS Access report, use =("!" & [Table.Field] & "!") in the control source field where Table.Field points to the table and field that contains the data to encode. The following Microsoft® Access formula places a tab function (in extended39) between fields: =("!"&[DataField1] & "$I" & [DataField2] & "!") Below is an example of placing the above formula in a text field on a report in Microsoft® Access 2000. When placing formulas in the control source field, be sure to specify the table and field together as in this example. To use fonts other than the self-checking versions, please refer to IDAutomation's MS Office Macros site. To determine the start and stop characters for particular types of barcode fonts or to see a list of all fonts offered, view IDAutomation's product index.

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