Hello, and welcome to a POSCatch.com product presentation, and today we are
going to show you how to create a UPC barcode label for free, and how to format
a UPC barcode label correctly, and lastly how to print sheets of barcode labels
from Microsoft Word. In order to create the barcode itself
you need to go to POSCatch.com, and we'll open up our website here. An Easy asy way to get
to the barcode generator is to just scroll down the page, and then you'll see a big
barcode here [on right of page] and it says "click here to make free 1d barcodes", just click on that.
And then this is the actual barcode generator itself; this is where we'll format
your UPC barcode. Now we also have an online tutorial that shows you
instructions step-by-step on how to do this. So go ahead and click here: it says,
"please click here for a tutorial", just click on that. It's going to open up a new screen for you.
And this is actually the tutorial right here. So a UPC barcode is
broken down into four unique sections, comprising of 12 total characters. And
the first character is what they call a "number system character", and that's the
leading digit for all UPC barcodes, and that "number system character" will be a
"0",. a "1", a "6", a "7" or an "8" [for standard retail applications only].
So you would choose from those digits to be your "number system character".
The second set of digits is five digits for your "manufacturer number"; that's the
identifying number for the manufacturer. The third set of digits is the product identifier,
or "item number". Now you don't have to use the actual item number for the
product, but you do want to set of five digits in the UPC barcode that
identifies that product whether it's, you know, a can of chicken noodle soup or a
candy bar or whatever it is. And then the last digit is what they call a "check
digit". It is also known as a "check sum digit ". This is very important.
We'll get a little bit more to that later as far as the formatting of a
"check digit". You would click on this link right here and then we already have the
page open for you; this is the page,
gs1.org website; this is the Global Language of Business website. This is
actually the organization that controls barcodes. It's a private
organization, nonprofit. So what you do is you paste in the your total of eleven
digits, and you put those in here. Snd this is an example that we have
right here, and then you hit "calculate", and see that? Your check digit is "9".
For these 11 numbers right here the formula.....
the algorithm, the correct check digit is "9". So this is a fully functional UPC
barcode number. You can now begin to format them correctly to be printed on
labels in Microsoft Word. So we'll go back to our tutorial here, and we
actually have a quick tutorial on how to do the correct settings in our barcode
generator. And we have it right here where it says "UPC barcode label size", so
the standard UPC barcode label sizes 1.5 x 1 inches dimension, and we have the
settings right here for our barcode generator. So we're going to go back to
our barcode generator, and this is our
sample number right here. So to format this to get the correct size we
want to bring the "bar width" down to "1", and then we also want to bring
the "height" down to a factor of "60". And then we want to leave the "margin"
default at "10". You don't need to make changes to any of these other
settings right here.
You just need to do the first three, so change the "bar width" to "1", the "height"
to "60" and the "margin" to "10". And this is your UPC-A barcode right here with the
full 12 digits including your check digit. Now what you want to do is you
want to right click on this, and then you want to "save picture as". So what we're
going to do is we're going to download a .png image file of this barcode.
And by the way, you'll want to do all of this with the barcode generator that we have
in Microsoft Edge [browser]. Our barcode generator works best in Microsoft Edge. So go ahead
and click on "save picture as" and then we'll just go ahead and we'll do
"barcodetest1"...and see it's saving as a .png file, and then just hit 'save".
So once you have your file saved (and you can view it like this), the next thing you
want to do is open up Microsoft Word so you can print your barcode labels. So the
first thing you want to do is go up here to the menu bar and click on "mailings",
and then the next thing you want to do is go down here to
the menu ribbon and click on "start mail merge" click on that, and then go down to
"labels", click on that. Microsoft Word is going to open up a new
dialog box, and we highly recommend using the "Compulabel" here under "label
vendors". There are other vendors you can use but we find that the Compulabel is a good one.;
it's very cost-effective, and it has a great template for Microsoft Word to be
able to do this, and again it is a 1.5 "x 1" label. So this is already preset to
the Compulabel right here, and then you want to set the "product number" to the
"310151."
So we're going to go ahead and click "OK", and there you go!
So here you see the outline of grid squares.
These are actually outlines of where your labels are going to be...you can quite easily
bring in your barcode image into these squares. So you just simply right-click
and then hit "paste", and there you go. And then do it again if you want and then
hit "paste" and you may need to readjust it if it doesn't go in incorrectly...
...
Say you want to print on all 50 labels that are on this page
right here? And that's quite easily done, so we'll go ahead and we'll delete these
out of here so we can show you. So you simply just highlight all of the grid
squares, and then what you do on your keyboard you will want...
...to enter the keys "Ctrl + V".
And look at that! And it pastes in 50 of those barcodes into this sheet of labels. Now these are
ready to go. When you go to print, it would be best to print to a laser
printer if you can for the highest quality.
OK, so i'm going to show you a sheet of labels right here; this is what it looks
like when it's fully printed. So we're just going to test these here. So I'm
going to open up Notepad. I have a barcode scanner here already plugged in,
USB barcode scanner ready to go. and then we're just going to go ahead and scan
some of these so you can see. See that? Scans right away!
OK, so these work. In fact what I'm going to do is I'm going to take one off here...
...So this is a awesome way to be able to create and print
high-quality, functional UPC-A barcode labels for FREE!
If you have any questions about this, please don't hesitate to contact us or visit our website at
https://poscatch.com. And thank you for watching. Have a great day!