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.

Creating barcodes in Microsoft® Word® is an easy task with IDAutomation products. IDAutomation has barcode plug-ins, macros and barcode fonts plus IDAutomation's ActiveX Controls, which are MS Office plug-ins and all are very simple to use. Keep in mind that the ActiveX Control cannot be tied to a mail-merge field. To use mail-merge, it will be necessary to use barcode fonts, and when using barcode fonts, it will require either adding the start and stop character or using IDAutomation's MS Office Macros to automate the process.

Microsoft® Word Tutorial Index:

Using the Barcode Plug-in:

The ActiveX Control plug-in must be installed in Windows® before applications will be able to "see" it. IDAutomation has provided an installation utility that will install the control on a local PC. The ActiveX Control may be ordered or download a demo from IDAutomation to test before purchase.

After installing the Active X Control plug-in, the control can be dragged, dropped and sized in a document. In Microsoft Word, choose View - Toolbars - Control Toolbox.

In the tool box, choose the more controls button:

Select the barcode control from the list of available ActiveX Controls. Select the control that starts with "IDAutomation", drop it in a document. After selecting it, the control will appear in the document, size 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.

When finished, exit the design mode by choosing the design mode button:

NOTE: The program must be in design mode to edit the properties of the control. If there are problems editing the properties of the control, press the design mode button to enable it. The ActiveX Control cannot be tied to a mail-merge field. To use the mail-merge it will be necessary to use barcode fonts, and to use barcode fonts, it requires either adding in the start and stop character or using IDAutomation's MS Office Macros.

Mail-Merge Barcoding

The only method of bar-coding in a Word mail-merge document is to use the barcode fonts. Automating the printing of self-checking fonts for a Word mail-merge is easy. All that is needed is to make sure the start and stop characters appear directly before and after the data in the barcode. To print the Code 39 Fonts from a MS Word mail merge, use !«FieldName»! for the merge field where FieldName is the name of the field to merge. This entire set of characters must have the barcode font selected for it, even though it will not look correct in the main document. After the merge is performed, "«" and "»" will be removed and FieldName will be replaced with the text in the data source.

If the self-checking fonts are not used then the data will need to be retrieved from Access or Excel where the font is already formatted in the data source. IDAutomation has an example of this, which may be downloaded from our MS Office Macros site.

Using Barcode Fonts in MS Word:

Implementing barcode solutions with IDAutomation fonts provides a high level of scalability with operating systems, applications and printer independence.

For non-technical users or non-programmers, use the self-checking barcode fonts. Self-checking fonts (such as Code 39 and Codabar) have the checking codes built-in. Check characters are used in more dense symbologies so the barcode scanner can verify it read the barcode 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 tools site.

Self-checking fonts are easy-to-use in Word as well as other applications and can be entered directly from the keyboard. All barcodes require a start and stop character and these 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 an 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 that other text typed in will be human readable.

Automating the printing of self-checking fonts for a Word mail-merge is very easy. It requires that the start and stop characters appear directly before and after the data in the barcode. Example: to print the Code 39 Fonts from MS Word mail merge, use the !«FieldName»! statement where FieldName is used for the name of the field to be merged. This entire set of characters must have the barcode font selected for it, even though it will not look correct in the main document. After the mail merge is performed, the "«" and "»" will be removed and the FieldName will be replaced with the text in the data source.

To use fonts other than the self-checking versions, please refer to the 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.

To embed True Type barcode fonts into a Word document, please visit the following page for assistance. Fonts may only be embedded in a PDF document with the purchase of a Developer License and discouraged from extracting the embedded fonts when distributed.

Using Word's POSTNET Barcode Utility

There is barcode utility that creates POSTNET barcodes built right into Microsoft Word. To use this feature, do the following:

Choose Tools - Envelopes and Labels.
On the next menu, enter the addresses and choose Options. On the options dialog, either select to have a POSTNET delivery point barcode or a FIM courtesy reply barcode generated.
For more information on this function of MS Word, please contact Microsoft.

Video Tutorials:

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