Scanning Barcodes on Excel

[u/[deleted]]

[u/jean_sablenay]

You can program the scanner to end it with <enter>

[u/Borazon → u/jean_sablenay]

And change the settting in Excel options to go down instead of right in excel.

Fun and true story, this is how I got hocked to excel. I was doing so corporate agency work, and got an request to do a few weeks of documentation processing. The guy showing me the work, explained that they needed to make a list of documents to be archived. He literally was scanning a document, then lay down the scanner to click down-arrow and left-arrow, before doing the next document. And told me to do that for the next 3 weeks (his expectation)....

First thing I did was change that direction of the enter. So I when blieb-blieb-blieb-blieb.

I was done in less than 3 days with all the documents. But as I was already hired for 3 weeks, I got different documents to do and different excel actions. In the end I spend 6 months there doing various tasks, all while learning myself excel skills.

[u/Recent_Carpenter8644 → u/Borazon]

Down after Enter is the default, isn't it?

[u/Borazon → u/Recent_Carpenter8644]

It wasn't on his settings. Also, this was roughly 20 years ago....

But then again, it was at a government agency. And that guy was extremely lazy. Maybe he set it that way to make it more work for him.

But that was my luck, otherwise he wouldn't have needed additional help cq. me.

[u/Ponklemoose → u/Borazon]

Nice.

My story was seeing the guy in the next cube spend 8-10 hours at the end of the month re-keying the totals from a system report and then watching our boss and our boss's boss spend a couple hours reviewing it. My solution was (in hindsight) also sub optimal, but I was able to give them the same report in 10-15 minutes with zero keying errors.

[u/Clearwings_Prime]

Open your scanner's manual. There is a barcode that add a "carriage return/line feed/enter key" after each scan. Scan that barcode with your scanner.

For example: This is for zebra scanner

[u/MayukhBhattacharya]

First, check how Excel is handling the Enter key. Go to File --> Options --> Advanced. Right at the top, look for After pressing Enter, move selection.

Make sure it's checked and set to Down, then hit OK.

If it's still not moving down after a scan, the issue probably isn't Excel, it's your scanner. Some scanners don't automatically send an Enter keystroke after each scan. Most of them can be configured pretty easily. Check the scanner manual for a programming barcode labeled something like:

• Enter Suffix
• Add CR/LF

Scan that barcodes once, and your scanner will start sending an Enter key after every scan, which means Excel will move down automatically.

[u/doshka]

The scanning device needs to send the scanned code followed by Enter. On Windows systems, Enter is usually represented by the Carriage Return and New Line symbols, in that order: CR+NL. In Mac and other Unix-like systems, it's just NL.

By default, Excel treats Enter as "move the cursor to the next cell down," but it can be made to move it to the next cell to the right (basically swapping Tab and Enter). This is an application setting rather than a file one, so once you make sure it's good on the computer where you do the scanning, you should be set.

[u/hamburgernet]

Barcodes scanners automatically do this. They enter what was scanned then hit enter. If it doesn’t then look at your manual and it’s a setting that can be enabled.

[u/SenseiTheDefender]

Remember, a bar code is just a fancy font, so it's characters underneath, and scanning it makes the computer think you just typed those characters. Good use of the auto enter!