How to Make UPC and EAN Barcodes in Excel

When you need to make UPC or EAN barcodes by the hundreds or thousands it doesn't make sense to create them one at a time! Azalea's UPC & EAN macros for Excel make batch-barcoding a breeze.

All About UPCs

How do you get UPC barcodes for your products? What's a 'company prefix'? Can you make up your own UPC numbers? You have so many questions, and we have so many answers!

Creative UPCs

There's no real reason to get creative with UPC barcodes on retail packaging.

Which makes it that much more delightful to see manufacturers doing silly, whimsical or just plain goofy stuff to their UPCs.

It's fun for the sake of fun!

How to Make UPC Barcodes in Excel

Needing a UPC barcode for your product/s really is a measure of success. It means you're working with established retailers or distributors who are fully engaged in the retail channel, upping the chances that your widget will be a winner. You're probably just days away from becoming a thousandaire! Hurray! Congratulations!

Once you've got your raw UPC numbers from GS1 (or from us!), you're ready to turn them into UPC barcodes. When you've got a lot of products, you'll have a lot of UPC numbers. And when you have a lot of UPC numbers the best place to manage them is in an Excel spreadsheet. And when your UPC numbers are in an Excel spreadsheet, UPCTools makes it easy, easy, easy to quickly turn them all into those lines and spaces we all know and love.

UPC Art : Form or Function?

An interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal has some really nice examples of gussied-up UPC barcodes. Which is more important- for a barcode to look pretty, or for it to function as it should, scanning accurately time after time? Clearly, done correctly, it can do both.

Print UPC & ISBN-13 Barcodes in Excel Spreadsheets (video)

A short video about printing UPC & ISBN-13 barcodes in your Excel spreadsheets using UPCTools. Use our free sample spreadsheets with macros that convert your data into a scannable UPC or ISBN-13 barcode.

www.azalea.com/UPC/Excel/

New York Times Notes UPC Barcode's 35th Birthday

The Times takes an interesting look at the UPC code, grandaddy of all modern barcodes. Thanks again, George Laurer!

Happy Birthday, UPC!

At 8:01 am on June 26th, 1974, the very first ever UPC (Universal Product Code) was scanned at Marsh's Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. The item? A 10 pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum.

Ye Olde Barcode Scam Once Again

Oh everybody thinks they can steal using barcodes. Some bozo realizes that UPC barcodes contain a unique number that identifies an item, not the item's price. Soooo, reproduce the barcode found on a cheap widget and slap it on an expensive widget. If the cashier doesn't notice the brand/price difference, you save money. Or should I say you use bar codes to shoplift.

Come on folks. Stealing is stealing. People have been teasing me about it since I began writing barcode software 19 years ago. Yes, I could. No, I haven't. No, I won't. Now go outside and play in the traffic.

Barcode Music!

As a fan of 8-bit music I was delighted to stumble across across a way to make music from barcodes.

A grrl nerd doing art with barcodes. I'm in love!

Can Barcodes Help the Vision-Impaired?

Peter Abrahams hopes so.

"For anyone who is blind or cannot see well the kitchen can be a real challenge. The first challenge is to know what is in all the similarly shaped tins and packets in the cupboard or fridge/freezer. A related challenge is to know what is written on each of them such as the cooking instructions and ingredients.

..Any packaged product has a barcode so this seems the obvious place to start. So scanning the barcode should provide a key to all the information about the content."

Combine barcodes textured with simple bumps or ridges in the packaging with a text-to-speech doohickey, it seems an easy, elegant solution.

All that's left is for the supermarket industry to get on board with a centralized interactive grocery database. A robotic voice reading "Two three four seven six five five eight two three four five" doesn't help much in deciphering a can of pet food from one of corned beef hash (though the distinction between these two particular examples is debatable).

Double barcodes

Look what Santa brought me! Double barcodes: UPC and EAN-13!!

They even came with free incense too. Wow, isn't Santa swell? I'm gonna be good all year and get more neat barcodes next Christmas too.

Putting the fun(k) in function

MagCulture takes a peek at Wallpaper mag's barcode whimsy, and Esquire UK's fun barcode designs.





Jetcityorange has a whole gallery devoted to DIY barcode art.



Yes it's true, barcodes (and barcode nerds) are hipper than you ever imagined.

666 in barcodes. NOT!

OK. It used to be funny. Now it just underlines how ignorant you are. Every time I see some knave repeating the "666 the Mark of the Beast is in UPC barcodes" urban myth I just want to gag.


Now repeat after me: 666 isn't part of UPC barcodes. Never was, never will be. There is no plot by Satan, the Devil, the Pope, or your ex- to use barcodes to a.) steal your soul, b.) further The Dark One's agenda or c.) activate the metal plate in your head. And no, UPC barcodes have nothing to do with the metal probe the aliens stuck up your ass that night.

So stop misquoting Revelation 13:16-18 you nitwits. I know where you live.