Month: June 2017

Exporting to Excel from PastPerfect

One of our collections uses Museum Software’s PastPerfect database, and as part of the barcoding project, they’re making lists of objects to have barcode labels printed for. You can export these lists to Excel, and BarTender can use Excel as a data source, so you’d think this would be a pretty easy workflow, and for the most part it is.

But it turns out that there are some objects in the collection with catalog numbers like “3.2E12”. And Excel really wants to be helpful, so when it sees something that’s almost in scientific notation, it nudges it into the right format. So that catalog number becomes “3.2E+12”, or “3.20E+12”, and it doesn’t keep the original string around anywhere. Even if you convert those fields back to text, they stay reformatted. So it has to be fixed before Excel imports it. Continue reading “Exporting to Excel from PastPerfect”

Quick Bartender Notes

Just a quick note to remind myself later:

When setting up a new label template with the Zebra 17154 label stock, Bartender will correctly set up the page size (2.125″ x 1.125″), but not the margins. It sets the top margin to 0, as if the label were located precisely at the perforation line. It isn’t — you have to set the top margin to .0625″ (same as the left margin, which it does set correctly) in order to align the printed labels with your template.

Also, when using Excel as a data source, you need to match the bit size of Bartender and Office. We had 32-bit Office 2016 installed, and 64-bit Bartender. Bartender couldn’t connect to the Excel file, since it needed the 64-bit OLE DB provider. Uninstalling 32-bit Office and installing the 64-bit version did the trick.