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I work for a community group that holds an annual fund raiser for charity over a weekend. I am an excel user and am wanting to set it up so that I can assign a barcode on a card to a specific person. My hope is to be able to scan the barcode have it take me to a specific cell in the spread sheet so I can update the Commitment amount. and provide as much anonymity for our donors as possible.

Can this even be done?

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  • Does the answer below help? It's been 5 days and no feedback :) Consider either accepting the answer or commenting as to why it doesn't solve the problem. Aug 26, 2014 at 0:29

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Most barcode scanners for use on computers are of they "Keyboard Wedge" type, which means they just show up like a keyboard, and when they scan data they "type" that data into the computer (this is simplifying things a bit, but close enough).

What you're looking for is some way of encoding something onto the barcode you print that can be recognized by either excel or another piece of software and converted into the keypress instructions to jump to a specific cell.

In excel, the "F5" key is "jump to cell", but the problem is most barcode data can't encode function or other special keys.

You could use something like AutoHotKey to look for a special character that you won't be otherwise typing, and then convert that to an F5 keypress. Eg, if you don't plan on typing the ~ (tilde) character, you could encode barcodes like "~B5", and write an autohotkey script to effectively remap the ~ key to F5. This is actually pretty simple, it's just a case of:

~::SendInput {F5}

Honestly, that's it.

I just went and generated a barcode with ~B5 on it (eg, from http://www.bcgen.com/linear-barcode-creator.html) and printed it, and scanned it in. When I scan the barcode, the cursor jumps to cell B5.

Anyway, that said, when I see "as much anonymity as possible" I immediately cringe :) I'm assuming you mean "from the people doing the updating of commitments". Because you're basically still giving people a unique ID in the form of a unique barcode, so for anyone who has the mapping, it's not anonymous at all.

Other things to consider:

  1. How do you stop people getting the wrong barcodes?

  2. What if the barcode fails to scan or scans incorrectly - will the check the cell matches what's printed underneath the barcode?

  3. There are much more robust ways of doing this, but they obviously don't involve Excel which is what you asked for :) Plus they probably involve some software development or similar and therefore again aren't really what you're after.

Finally, worst case is, regardless of all this stuff, you could just get away with giving each person a unique barcode number and then just scan their Id into a text file and type in their amounts, and then just marry the ID up later. No need for excel or jumping or other scripts.

Just some other thoughts! Hope this is helpful.

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