Creating Barcodes

Barcodes are very common to businesses worldwide. Among other things, it allows your inventory to be tracked from one end of the supply chain to the other. However some items may not have a barcode on them for various reasons. Using the Lists & Label Manager, you can create many different kinds of barcode labels for use with you own inventory.

A barcode (also bar code) is a machine-readable representation of information in a visual format on a surface. The most common barcodes consist of multiple vertical lines of varying thicknesses, separated by blank spaces of variable thicknesses. When a barcode is scanned into your computer, the data is sent to your PC as if it had been typed by the keyboard.

The industrial use of barcodes started in the 1960s, with one of the earliest uses being the identification of rail road cars. Common barcodes started appearing on grocery shelves in the first half of the 1970s as the UPC code to automate the identification of grocery items. Today, barcodes can be found just about anywhere and are used for identification in almost all types of business. When barcodes are implemented in business processes, procedures can be automated to increase productivity and reduce human error. Barcoding should be used within a business whenever accurate identification or tracking is needed.

ManageMore comes with the ability to create many different styles of barcode labels, with many different types of barcodes being available. These barcodes are available through fonts that install when you first utilize the Lists & Label Manager. Of course, you can click the Fonts icon in any of the Lists & Labels Manager windows to reinstall the fonts on a machine should you ever need to do so. The fonts installed include those for Code 39, Code 128, UCC 128, CODABAR, Interleaved 2 of 5, UPC-A, UPC-E, EAN-8, EAN-13, and Postnet.

To create barcode labels, you will need to edit or create a new template in the Lists & Labels Manager. Please see this section of the ManageMore User's Guide for more information on how to do this.

Once you have either created a band in a template or use one that is already present, right click on the band and then click on New Frame. Adjust the size and position of the frame until it is how you desire it to be. Then right click on the frame to access the Frame Properties.

The Frame Properties are where you will define the data that goes into the frame and the way in which that data will be formatted. For a valid barcode to be present on the label, we will need to get the SKU encoded so that the barcode scanner can decode it. The encoded data also must be displayed using a barcode font, since that is all the barcode scanner is capable of reading.

To encode the SKU data, we will need to make use of one of several functions. To access these functions, click on the lookup button at the end of the contents field. Then select the plus sign next to Functions, then the plus sign next to Strings. Many functions will be shown with the barcode encoding functions beginning with the letters "BC." Select the function that corresponds to the type of barcode you want to use by double clicking on it.

The function will then be brought back into the Contents field with the word "string" in parentheses. This is where you will put the name of the field for your item number. If you want to use the SKU number, type in LSIN:SKU in place of the word "string;" if you want to use the UPC number, type in LSIN:UPC in the place of the word "string."

Now that we have the encoding function and the field to encode in the contents of the frame, you need to set the font to the corresponding barcode font. To do this, you will click on the Font button on the lower left hand corner of the window. This will bring up a typical Windows font dialog box, similar to those seen in many other software programs. Select the font, which will begin with "IDAutomation," and the font size (see below). The font chosen should match the encoding function that you used. For example, if you used the barcode encoding function BC_128, you would choose the corresponding barcode font, IDAutomationC128. Once you have made the selection, click OK.

Having selected the barcode encoding function, the field to encode and the barcode font, we are done with creating a barcode on a label template. You can then continue to process the labels as prescribed in the Lists & Labels Manager section.

It is important to note that a proper size of barcode must be used when creating barcode labels, so that a barcode reader properly decodes the information and sends it to your computer. You would not, for example, use an Extra Extra Large version of a barcode font if you were printing jewelry labels. Similarly, you would not use the Extra Small version to print out a barcode label for a large box.

Each font comes in multiple sizes from extra small to extra extra large. Approximate font sizes can be found in the table below:

Font Size	Approximate Size at 12 points
Extra Small	1/16" - 1/4"
Small	1/8" - 1/3"
Medium	1/4" - 1/2"
Large	1/4" - 3/4"
Extra Large	1/2" - 1"
Extra Extra Large	3/4" - 1 1/2"

To find the point size you need for your purposes: Measure the height of the barcode you need, divide this by the larger of the heights for the font size chosen above, then multiply the result by 12. For example, if you need a barcode 1" high and want to use the large font, you would need to set the point size to 1 ÷ 3/4 × 12 = 16 point.

For best results, try to stay in a range of 6 to 24 points. Straying too far beyond this range can cause the fonts to not be readable by your barcode reader, though they may seem to print properly.



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