Barcode Generation in Excel: The Simple Way

Barcodes are a bunch of lines and spaces representing some machine-readable information. Barcodes have a more comprehensive range of applications, starting from your products in a grocery store to something confidential. This tutorial on Barcode in Excel is all about understanding barcodes in detail and generating a couple of barcodes in a step-by-step manner.

What Is Barcode in Excel?

A barcode, in general, is a digital code storing machine-readable information that looks like a collection of black bars and white spaces. Microsoft excel has incorporated the addition of Barcode with some minor add-ons, like a new font.

Now that you know what a barcode is in general and what a barcode is in Excel, you will try to create a barcode using Microsoft excel.

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How to Generate Barcode in Excel?

Before creating a barcode in excel, you need to make sure that you have some related barcode fonts in Microsoft excel as they won't come as default. So, it’s best to walk through the procedure in a step-by-step manner.

First, check for the barcode font in Excel, and if unavailable, then an excellent suggestion would be to get one for free. Now, go ahead and try to install a barcode font in Excel using the explanation below.

Install Font for Barcode in Excel

There are a bunch of websites providing both paid and open-source barcode fonts software. 3 of 9 Barcode TrueType is one of the highly recommended ones.

Download the font package as shown below.

Unzip the downloaded package and run the setup file to install the font, as shown below.

Barcode in Excel

Now open Microsoft Excel and create an empty table as shown below.

Going ahead, try to enter the data in the first column. By default, the data type will be general. According to the input you provide, Excel will convert the data implicitly. For example, if you enter float data, then excel will implicitly convert the data type from general to float.

It is best to be on the safer side; so, manually assign the data type to the column as text data type, as this helps you create barcodes.

The next step is writing a formula to generate a barcode.

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The Formula for Barcode in Excel

Excel formulas can be written in a variety of ways in order to generate barcodes. You will explore the two most straightforward ways as follows.

Select the cell adjacent to your input and write the formula as shown below. Here, my input column is 'A.'

You can write it down as follows:

"*" &A2&"*" or "("&A2&")"

After you write the formula, you can drag down the formula to apply the same formula to all the cells below, as shown in the following image.

Next, select the resultant column, in my case, column 'B,' and choose the barcode font from the fonts menu dropdown as shown below.

The resultant final table will look like the following image below.

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Types and Fonts of Barcodes 

You can generate a wide range of barcodes on excel such as: 

1. Code 128 
2. Code 39 
3. UPC/ EAN 
4. I2of5
5. UPC-E
6. QR 
7. Postnet 
8. Intelligent Mail

Benefits of Generating Barcodes in Excel 

Generating barcodes in excel is inexpensive and quick. There are several other benefits of creating barcodes in excel such as - 

1. You can easily produce product catalogs and lists 
2. Items in stock can be tracked easily in excel 
3. UPC codes and print product numbers can be arranged easily. 

Hence, excel is great for generating barcodes and extremely useful in managing inventory. 

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Other Free Tools to Generate Barcodes 

If excel seems too complicated to you, don’t worry, there are several other free tools that can be used as a replacement for excel. These tools are also easy to use and good alternatives for generation barcodes in excel: 

1. Barcode.tec
2. Bartender Software
3. Cognex
4. POSGuys

With this, you have come to an end of this tutorial on Barcode in Excel.

Wrapping up

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