Idautomation.Com, Inc. Releases Ms Office Macros And Visual Basic Source Code For Barcode Font Automation - Company Business and Marketing

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, Sept 18, 2000

IDAutomation.com, Inc. has made MS Office Macros and source code, that allow for integration of barcode font technology into business applications, available at its website for free download. The free tools allow technical users and software developers to integrate modern barcode font technology directly into their business applications instead of having to export the data to a proprietary label program.

MICR, OCR and older bar code technologies such as Codabar and Code 39 are easy to print as a font. However, most modern implementations of barcodes require complicated check digit calculations for error correction that cannot be performed by the fonts themselves. The tools and source code at the IDAutomation.com web site will perform the proper calculations required and format the return string for the selected barcode font. Several barcode types are supported including Code 128, EAN, UPC, MSI, Interleaved 2 of 5 and PDF417.

The MS Office macro download includes examples of printing barcodes from MS Access reports, MS Word mail-merge and Excel spreadsheets. The MS Office macros are implemented in a single VBA module that may be easily exported and imported among MS Office applications. The Visual Basic source code provided includes a barcode printing application written in VB 6.0. Source code is also available for download in ANSI C and Java at the web site.

Barcodes can also be printed as graphic images. However, many companies prefer printing barcodes with fonts because they print fast and are optimized to generate output quickly on a variety of different printers. In addition, it usually takes less CPU time to produce output as a font than as a graphic image, because the CPU must generate a new image for each barcode.