How can you write a letter using barcode scanner?

jpod

jpod

jpod

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I use MS Word

Is there a way of using a barcode scanner/pen to scan a board with barcodes on that then inserts a 'section' into a Word document.

For instance, blocks of text - but you are making a bespoke document - so you want to choose sections of text - assigned/labelled to each barcode - and add them to the document.

Explain like I am ten.

I know there is an auto complete facility - does it enable you to add a few paragraphs?

I am all ears. Thanks
 
hood1971 said:
Immediately thought of Mail Merge with Barcodes, but that creates barcodes rather than reads from them.
Click to expand...

Been a while since I used mail merge. I used it with a table - it worked well but there was a word limit - if this has changed it is a good way of collating data and populating a report! Thanks.
 
Quartz said:
This sounds like autocomplete.
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Ah ha! Autotext in MS Word - select a section and press Alt F3 and it saves the text section - this is good.

I wonder if it is possible to use a scanner to scan the bar code and enter the text in the letter. Just seems a great way of writing a bespoke document quickly! Visual rather than keyboard skills.

Many thanks for posting, it is appreciated.
 
You could create barcodes with the text you want and scan them, or if you get auto complete working, create a bar code using the trigger for that auto complete

Either should work
 
Nikumba said:
You could create barcodes with the text you want and scan them, or if you get auto complete working, create a bar code using the trigger for that auto complete

Either should work
Click to expand...

Hi Nik how would you do that - what would be the software to create a barcode that when scanned makes MS Word autocomplete?

Thanks Pod
 
How tech savvy are you ? Is it just plain text you are adding? or are you looking for something more advanced in terms of formatting?. I.e. you scan a code and it will auto add a table in a certain format, or the top half of a letter with your address and logo etc.

Either way, sounds like you want to:

- Have your cursor at a point in the document
- Initiate a scan of a bar code.
- Scan a barcode that will return a bit of text like "01243252345"
- Use that text to look up a larger block/section of text - possibly be sourced from a seperate data document ( I would do that )
- Select and Paste that text block into the document at the point the cursor was at

I did a similar sort of thing years ago, but I've forgotten a lot of it. :-/ ... but going by your description, you're really looking at macros and visual basic coding (VBA) within the office suite to get it to where you think you want it to be. If you have the full versions of office, then the macro and scripting is built in.

That would require your office environment to allow the running of macros within office ... not all allow this these days (mine doesn't anymore). There is a ton of information out there about it though.

An issue that will arise though is that there doesn't really seem to be a way to give a document section a user defined label/name that you can reference easily. By that I mean, suppose you have a source document you want to copy from, and in that you have lots of sections that split up the content into blocks of text you want to copy. In that source document, you dont seem to be able to say: "Create new section, and call it "X". If you could you would be able to write a script that said -> open source doc, select section "X", copy it, paste it back in".

Sections in word just seem to be like a line drawn through the content ... in the same way that page break is ... you cant name the gap between 2 pages sort of thing.

That being said, sections in a document do get an index number ( but its defined by Word itself).

after a bit of googling .... and a bit of " hmmm, might work "

If you created a source document, with sections for each block of text, then you could start each section with the barcode text as an identifying marker in it, followed by content you want copied. Then your script could work alongs the lines of:

- Scan the barcode to get the marker you are looking for
- open the source document and search through it till you find the barcode marker you scanned.
- in the background, the cursor effectively jumps to that point of matched text
- you can use VBA to return what section index number the cursor is currently at (lets say 5)
- you can then select the range of text within that known section number. (i.e. select Document.Section.Index(5)* )
- copy it and paste it back into your document.

something along those lines might work.

Lastly, if you are using scripts, then the scripts are generally saved within the document as well. So if you were to simply create the content using the barcodes, save it and send it to someone else, they would get the scripts included too ( albeit hidden away within the scripting functions ). You would need to be sure to save it in a manner that doesn't include the scripts.

I suppose: CTRL-A, CTRL-N, CTRL-V would work in a matter of seconds - just copy the final content into a new doc.

I suppose the barcode idea have potential to make things quite simple to build up documents quickly. But its also add a lot of time to script it all in the first place.

* that is not proper code, just illustrative.
 
[Put in a second post, because its worth seperating as a different method.]

If you want a really simple method without scripts, I would simply use a source document that has all the sections in it, and you manually copy and paste the stuff from the source into your new document.

so create the document, its sections and at the start of each block of content, you add in the barcode text as a marker.

To use the barcodes, hit F3 to bring up the search, scan the barcode, and it'll jump straight to the marker within the source doc. You can then select the content and copy / paste it over to the new document. With keyboard shortcuts, it wouldn't really take that long for each thing.

Yeah, its more steps, and swapping between documents, but its by far the simplest method.
 
jpod said:
Hi Nik how would you do that - what would be the software to create a barcode that when scanned makes MS Word autocomplete?

Thanks Pod
Click to expand...

In word I would create the autocomplete part, so if you type ^123 it would be replaced with "Hi how are you" for example, then go online for a barcode creator and create a barcode with ^123, then you should be able to scan the barcode while in word and it will do the autocomplete.

Not got a barcode scanner to hand to test with but that should work, the tricky bit would be keeping the autocomplete upto date and the same across several users
 
Nikumba said:
In word I would create the autocomplete part, so if you type ^123 it would be replaced with "Hi how are you" for example, then go online for a barcode creator and create a barcode with ^123, then you should be able to scan the barcode while in word and it will do the autocomplete.

Not got a barcode scanner to hand to test with but that should work, the tricky bit would be keeping the autocomplete upto date and the same across several users
Click to expand...

Noted, thanks for posting.
 
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