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Barcode Scanner for inventory using exel?

sswilson

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I've never been a corporate MS Office user (outside of Word) so I've never played with Excel in any way shape or form.

I've got a temp job coming up and it sounds like they intend to give me a bar code scanner to do inventory, and expect me to import that info into a spreadsheet. I've done some quick searches and it looks like I can probably just create a new excel spreadsheet and then assign what the barcode scanner picks up to specific fields. Is it really as simple as that?

Thanks in advance.... :)
 
As far as I know they just emulate keystrokes... so click in cell, scan barcode and it should type out the digits/letters.
 
Normally a scanner just acts like a keyboard. If you scanned 5 barcodes, normally it would just list all 5 sequentially with a carriage return between them.

Any sort of organization would have to be done with excel.
 
xentr_thread_starter
Thanks. I'll have to see how this shakes out. They haven't given me any info outside of inventory to be done, they want a spreadsheet, and they'll provide a scanner. :)

I would have expected something like this to be done using whatever software package they use, and being provided with their hardware, but it doesn't sound like that's the case as they want me to bring my own laptop. (Pity I couldn't just scan it into my Kindle Scribe and export a PDF..... ).
 
We use bar codes scanners at my job.

You can configure them the way you want, to insert a character before / after what you scan (like a carriage return), and a lot more.

As the others said, they act as keyboard, but you have some power on it :cool:
 
I have had to work with an ID scanning company in the past and was tasked with speeding up their assembly. Needless to say the scanning software for the was exceptionally complicated. But even some hand held barcode only scanners have complicated software bundles but others brands are just basically glorified USB keyboards. It will really depend on what they provide you.
 
xentr_thread_starter
I have had to work with an ID scanning company in the past and was tasked with speeding up their assembly. Needless to say the scanning software for the was exceptionally complicated. But even some hand held barcode only scanners have complicated software bundles but others brands are just basically glorified USB keyboards. It will really depend on what they provide you.

It doesn't sound like there's any kind of software required but I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

I'm headed to the site this morning so we'll see how it works. Apparently it's a bluetooth scanner so hopefully I can just adopt it to my laptop and it'll fill whatever cell I've got selected.
 
It doesn't sound like there's any kind of software required but I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

I'm headed to the site this morning so we'll see how it works. Apparently it's a bluetooth scanner so hopefully I can just adopt it to my laptop and it'll fill whatever cell I've got selected.
heyo, let me know the make model of scanner and if it's one I sell, I likely will have resources I can access to help you figure it out if you have any difficulties or frustrations.
 
xentr_thread_starter
heyo, let me know the make model of scanner and if it's one I sell, I likely will have resources I can access to help you figure it out if you have any difficulties or frustrations.

Thanks for the offer, but it's all good. No idea on model, it picked up the hardware as soon as I plugged it in.

Task was as simple as it sounded above, although mind numbing to say the least. :)

Open a blank excel, select the first cell, scan the ser# to fill the cell, hit enter to advance to the next cell, throw the item into the scanned bin and repeat for the next one. Multiply that by 172 items and you're done. :)

Oh, and don't forget to hit enter or it starts to get messy.

edit: If I knew enough about excel, there's probably a setting which would automatically advance to the next cell after getting the bar code info, but that's above my pay grade. :)
 
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