Use Microsoft Word as a barcode generator

Posted on November 19, 2008 at 5:47 am

Barcode labels are easily readable by optical scanners. It is useful for operations wherein a manual reading is slower than a machine reading. Think of grocery cashier lanes and department stores – barcodes help them a lot to speed up the overall process. Most people actually don’t know how it is generated. We don’t need a special machine to create or print a barcode label. Barcodes are just plain text using a barcode font.

One of the fonts you can try is from http://www.dobsonsw.com where you can download the zipped freeware 128 font. After downloading and unzipping, copy the two .ttf files into C:\Windows\Fonts directory:

Once the above is done you can now use the two true type fonts (TTF) using any word editor. On the example below I used MS Word:

You can see from above that the two fonts are now under my list of fonts. MS Office programs use the C:\Windows\Fonts to generate the choices of fonts for MS Word. If you want to add any font, make sure the font file is in the directory shown below:

You can see below sample where I typed 1234567890 using the Code128 font:

The trick that you can use is to type in the characters using a human understandable font (i.e. Arial, Helvetica) then after you typed in the whole thing, convert the font to the barcode font.

Basically the whole thing is just installing a new font and then using it on MS Word or any word processor. You can print the barcodes into sticker papers so you can cut the labels out and paste it on whatever items you want. You can always put in a regular font along with the barcode font as aide.

Ben Carigtan writes about computers, technology and how to get the best out of them.

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4 Responses to “Use Microsoft Word as a barcode generator”

eder.apt-get said on : November 19th, 2008 at 8:26 am

Great..I din´t know that I could use Word for barcodes..

Nick Burns said on : November 19th, 2008 at 3:35 pm

Hi. Long time reader, first time commenter ( I think )

You’re using the font incorrectly. You can not simply type ‘1234567890′ and change it to a barcode font and expect a barcode reader to understand it. There are algorithms (freely available via a search) in play that encode the text into a proper code that can be understood by a reader. If you look at that site you linked to you’ll see there are plugins and utilities to correctly generate a barcode.

Try the online converter at the above site, you’ll see that 1234567890 actually produces š1234567890Aœ. Those characters at the beginning and ending of the number are known as start and stop characters so the reader knows how to interpret the text.

We use Smart128 here at work which does even more encoding so that a long string of characters are actually reduced to a smaller set in order for the barcode to fit on the page. Look at this page for the specification (again at the link you provided)
http://freebarcodefonts.dobson.....mation.htm

I think the easiest barcode to use is Code 39, all it requires is an asterisk before and after any text you want to convert to a barcode.

Just thought I’d chime in on this, since it took me some time to get the right algorithm for our barcodes. I felt it only right to make sure that your readers were informed about this.

ben said on : November 20th, 2008 at 1:46 am

Nick, you are right about the extra logic on the syntax. on code 39 for example, I needed to add asterisks before and after the text for it to be recognizable. For example *1234567890* in code 39 will give an output of 1234567890.
Also I got another tip to use Wordpad instead of Word because Word could change the spacing of the fonts and make the whole barcode unreadable for the optic reader.

Brian Dobson said on : November 20th, 2008 at 6:22 pm

Code 128 requires quite a lot of work to calculate the check digit. There is an add in for Word available for the above mentioned font by the producer of it (yes, that’s me) at: http://freebarcodefonts.dobsonsw.com.

The add in also encodes in Variant C, which is mentioned above, that shortens the length of digit pairs by one (10 digits encoded = a barcode length of 5 digits.)

Thanks for mentioning me on your blog.

Brian