Hello, and welcome to a POSCatch.com presentation, and today we're going to
show you how to easily and cost-effectively do time and attendance
tracking with a simple 1D barcode, and of course you also need a barcode scanner,
and to be able to do the tracking itself with a simple formula in an Excel
spreadsheet. So let's get right to it, and let's start the creation of the barcode.
itself. So what you want to do is you're going to want to open up your
Microsoft Edge browser, and the reason why it's recommended for you to use the
Microsoft Edge browser is because our barcode generator works best in the
Microsoft Edge browser. So you want to go to our website which is POSCatch.com;
that's P-O-S-C-A-T-C-H.com, and then scroll down the page and over here you'll see a
1D barcode.It says, "click here to make free 1D barcodes", go ahead and click on the
barcode generator image. And this takes you to our barcode generator to where
we can now start to creation of your tracking barcode. So what you want to do
is use a Code 128 Auto, which is the default barcode symbology
or type that's listed here, so you want to use the default Code 128 Auto. By the
way, Code 128 you can actually have up to a 128 characters in
this barcode, but in this example we of course won't use that many. Also, too Code 128
can input the full range of ASCII characters, which as you can see
you can do text, numbers and also additional characters. So, for example,
let's just say that you have an employee by the name of John Smith.
OK, see that? And then maybe John has the employee number of 1234, so you can
encode all of that into a Code 128 barcode. But also let's just say that
...you want to do Last Name, First Name, which is Smith, John, OK.
And that's your tracking barcode right there, so the way to format this to the
right size, because that's actually a rather large barcode, you want to bring
your "Bar Width" down to "1".
OK, and then your "Height" down to around "50"; that's about the perfect size right there.
You can change the font size here if you'd like down here but that's about
right the way it is.
You can also change the coloring here;
however, we don't recommend it. It's best to keep the traditional black lines
with the white contrasted background that's the easiest color coding for a
barcode scanner to read.
OK, so once you have the desired barcode that you want with the data and also the
formatting, what you want to do is right click on it and then you do "save picture as",
and that will save this as a .png file, and we've already done this here
for you , so we're going to open this up. And you can go ahead and import that into Microsoft Word,
or some other application to be able to print these out, OK.
So once you have that done,
the next thing you want to do is test it, so i actually have printed out one of
these already, and i have a USB barcode scanner connected to my machine here. So I'm
just going to open up Notepad, and there you go! See that? Scans right it,
Smith John. Of course if you had other data in there that would also show as well.
So we know that that barcode works, so let's go ahead and open up Excel. So what
we're going to want to do is set up Excel to where we can do a very easy
tracking for time & attendance. So to do the date/time stamp normally the way
you would do is put in a formula like this would be "=now()",
then as you can see and it automatically inputs the current time
that is on this machine that i'm using now, so it has the current time/date of
the machine that i'm using now. And then what you can do is you can go ahead and
scan in Smith John, see that there? But let's just say that you want to go
ahead and have this automatic, so every time when you go ahead and scan in here
you want this to be updated as well. So let's go ahead and change the formula.
So I already have a formula here; I'm going to go ahead and put in here.
OK, so this is the formula right here, and actually this formula is in the
bottom of this YouTube video that you're looking at, so if you look down to the
details at the bottom of this YouTube video you can see this formula up here, OK.
So basically what we want to do is you want to copy this formula down,
and then let's go ahead and we'll scan again. Oh, and see that? It says
we're getting an error message, and the reason why we're getting an error
message is because we need to change a setting in this excel spreadsheet. So
let's go ahead and click "OK", and then we're going to go to "Formulas",
and then we're going to do "Enable Iterative Calculation" right here, and
then we're going to click "OK". Alright, and now the next time that we scan this
should go ahead and work; let's see. There we go! You see that? So we have an
automatic update every time that you scan that barcode that we created.
You have an automatic update in column "A" that goes ahead and updates this.
So let's see, the time just changed to 18 minutes past the hour, so I'm going to go
ahead and scan this again so you can see the time got updated, so let's do this again.
See that there? So it changed from 17 to 18 minutes past the hour.
Now this is a very quick and easy and inexpensive way to do time and
attendance tracking with a 1D barcode, with a simple USB barcode scanner and to
do the tracking in an Excel spreadsheet. And by the way, for the barcode scanner
to scan in you want to make sure that you have carriage return enabled so it
keeps going down to the next line. If you don't have carriage return enabled on
your barcode scanner you will definitely want to get that turned on so you'll be
able to do an automatic enter down to the next line. If you have any further
questions about this video please don't hesitate to contact us directly or leave
a comment in the YouTube comments below for this video and we'll be more than
happy to get back to you. Thank you so much and have a great day!