[AccessD] Adding Bar Coding and Scanners to an Access Application

Brad,

 As the others have said, it's fairly straight forward.

 The "Wedge" type scanner Rocky mentioned goes between keyboard and PC.
Because of that, the PC can't tell if data was keyed in or scanned.   Guns
however can transmit a prefix and/or suffix along with the data, so it's
possible to "flag" data coming from the gun. On the Access side, anytime
your waiting for keyboard input, you can receive scanned data.

 There are also USB based guns and most come with a driver to make it appear
as keyboard input. Beyond that there are wireless handhelds, etc that
require a little more work, but in this day and age, it's pretty plug and
play.

 On the printing of bar codes, it's not as simple as just getting a font.  A
font only gives you the "characters" for a Symbology.  There's no
programming there to make sure you follow the rules for it (check digits,
guard characters, density, etc).

 Two of the most popular symbologies are 3 of 9 (alpha numeric) and 2 of 5
(numeric only).

 If you stick with one of those, you probably could get away with just
getting a font. But if you stray out into others, I would strongly suggest
getting a 3rd party DLL or Lib such as abarcode.

 There are also media considerations, but from the sounds of things, you
needs are simple there.

Jim.


-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Brad Marks
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2013 02:28 PM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: [AccessD] Adding Bar Coding and Scanners to an Access Application

All,

In order to save time and improve accuracy, our Vice President of
Operations would like for me to look into the possibility of using bar
codes to collect "labor" information from the factory floor.  This is
basically to record the number of parts that are completed by a
work-center.  To do this, we would like to use a scanner to read the
"Job Number" from an Access report (Factory Floor "Traveler").

I have some experience with bar coding back in the 1970s in an IBM
mainframe environment, in a prior life, on a different planet  :-)

I have no experience with bar coding in the Microsoft Access realm.

If I have an Access report that has a key (such as "A12345") how can I
add a bar code to the report for this piece of information?

If I am able to print a bar code for such a piece of information on a
report, what is needed in order to use a scanner to "input" this key
into an Access application or other Windows-based application?

Thanks,
Brad

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