Hi everyone, Kevin here. Today we’re going to learn how to create barcodes in Excel. It’s completely free and you don’t even have to install anything, including Excel. Let’s dive in. Here I am in the Excel desktop version. If you don’t have this and you don’t want to install anything, I did say in the intro that you can still follow along. You can also use Excel entirely for free on the web. Simply navigate to excel.new. If you’d like to follow along today, I’ve also included a link to this same exact workbook that we’ll be using today down below in the description. Down below, I have a variety of different products that we offer here at the Kevin Cookie Company, along with the associated UPC code. And then in this third column, I would like to generate a barcode that represents this UPC code. However, before we generate the barcode, one thing you may notice is some of these UPC codes start with a zero. If you just enter in a number in a cell, if you have any leading zeros, it’ll automatically drop them off. So, you may need to change the format of your cell, depending on how your barcode number is structured. Here I have it entered in as text to make sure that it maintains this leading zero. If you have codes that start with a number, then you’re fine. You could leave it set as a number. If you’d like to change the format of a cell, here I can simply highlight all of these cells and I’ll press control together with one on my keyboard. This opens up a dialogue that allows me to modify the format of the cells. Now by default, it’s set to general. And again, that’ll drop off the leading zero and I want to keep that. So here I’ve set it to text, but again, it depends on the numbers that you have and whether you want to maintain leading zeros. I’ll set it to text and then click on okay. Now that we’ve updated the formatting, it’s time to insert a barcode. And to do that, we’re going to use a function called image. That allows us to insert an image into a cell from a source location. If you have an older version of Excel, it may not have that function available, in which case you could just do this on the web entirely for free. To enter the function, we could type directly into the cell, but I actually prefer using the function helper. With this cell selected, C5, let’s go up on top on the top toolbar and let’s click on the insert function icon. This now opens up a dialogue where we can search for the function that we would like to use. Now I mentioned it’s the image function. So right up on top, I’ll type in image. And over here, let’s click on go and you should see one result back. Here’s image, I’ll select that and then click on okay. This now opens up all of the different function arguments and there’s only one required argument and that’s the source. How do we know that? Well, that’s the one that’s in bold and all the others aren’t in bold. For this function to work, we only need to fill in the source. Now for the source, this is going to be the service that we’re going to get our barcode image back from. And it turns out there’s a very good service and it’s a free and open source API where you can input a barcode value and it’ll send you back an image of that barcode. For this, let’s type in quotes. So open quote and then paste in the following URL. You’ll find it down below in the lower third and also in the description of this video. When you paste in the URL, here you’ll see a Microsoft Excel security notice. I know it looks a little bit scary. The reason why is it’s going to send data to an external service and then it’s going to receive an image back. So, it wants to make sure that we’re okay with that and we are. So down below, let’s click on paste everything and that’ll now enter the URL in. So here you can see that we have the URL with quotes at the beginning and then let’s insert quotes again at the very end. And over on the right-hand side, you can see the value that we’ll be feeding in as part of this argument. Now we don’t want to just feed in the URL. We also need to tell this API what barcode we would like to generate. So, at the very end here, we also need to append or pass in the barcode value. Let’s insert the ampersand character. So, we’re going to append our barcode value to the end of this URL. I’m going to pull the function arguments down so we can see all of our different UPC codes. And over here, I’ll click into cell B5. Right over here, that’s now inserted that value. Now, right down below, we can click on okay. Again, we don’t have to fill in any of these optional arguments. Let’s click on this. And look at that, we now have barcodes for all of these different UPCs. That was so easy. Now, over on the left-hand side, if you’d like to see a larger version of it, over here, I could pull the row height down to make it a little bit bigger and there we see a larger version of the barcode. Honestly, that looks beautiful. Here, I’ll undo that to bring it back to the same size as all the others. Now, here, I’m using a table in Excel. So, when I filled the function into this cell and automatically brought it down to all of these other rows within the table. However, if you’re not using a table, you could also hover over the bottom right-hand corner and your icon will change into a plus icon and then you could drag it down to apply to all the other cells down below. However, I find working with tables makes things easier. So that’s why I chose to do that. If you’d like to turn your data into a table, you can press Control T on your keyboard, T as in table, and when you press that, it’ll turn your data into a table just like what you see here. Now, I know we’re all excited about generating these UPC codes, but I actually have some more work that I need to get done. If we look down below, I have another table with all of our products and an internal product tracking number. And I would like to turn these into a barcode as well. However, this needs a different type of barcode. These aren’t UPC codes. So, let’s see if this same function can help us with this. This time I’ll click into the cell and here I can go to the formula bar up on top, and this time let’s type in equals image. That’s the name of the function that we’re going to use. And here the first argument is the source. So again, let’s insert open quotes and then let’s type in or paste in the source location. Again, you could find that in the description and then we get that security notice. Let’s click on paste everything. And at the very end, let’s enter in close quotes. Now let’s enter in the ampersand because we want to pass in or append the product number. So over here, I’ll click into this cell which contains the product number. And at the very end, let’s now close the parentheses and then hit enter. And here it now generates a barcode for all of these different product numbers. Now, what’s really nice about this API is when you feed in a product number, based on the number that you feed in, it figures out what the best barcode format is for that number. And here it’s determined that this format works the best. This is also known as code 128. Now, let’s say that maybe you don’t want a code 128 barcode. Maybe you want a code 39 barcode. Here I could click into this cell. And when we look at the function up above and the source location, you’ll notice this one portion of the URL called auto. What this does is it automatically determines what the best barcode format is. However, you can also override this. So here, for example, I want code 39. Let me type that in as the barcode format that I would like back. And then I’ll hit enter. And look at that. It’s now automatically adjusted the barcode to match code 39 format. So, you could get back any type of barcode that you need. I find that auto tends to work well, but if you have a specific format that you want, you can also specify that directly in the source URL. Now, you might be wondering, what are all of the different barcode formats? Well, for that, let’s go to the URL down below. Here I am now on the homepage for barcode API. And over on the left-hand side, you’ll see all the different barcode formats that you can generate using this API. If you’d like to use any one of these directly in Excel, you simply take the name of the barcode and then insert it into the source URL in place of auto. And then you could generate any one of these. Again, you have all the different options right here. Back in Excel, let’s now try this with one more example. I want to turn this URL into a QR code. Let’s click into the cell and then type in equal image. Again, we’re going to use that image function. Right up on top, first we need to enter in a source. I’ll open quotes and then enter in that URL. Here we see that warning, let’s paste everything, and then let’s close the quotes. Then we also need to pass in the URL. So over here, let’s enter in the ampersand so we can append something. And then I’ll click into this cell with the URL. Up on top, let’s close the parentheses and then hit enter. And look at that, we now have a QR code. So, what’s really nice is it automatically determines that this is a URL and that a QR code would work the best for this inputted data. That is so cool. Now, hopefully all of you will pull out your phone and navigate to this website. I mean, that is why my boss lets me put together videos like this. We actually get some substantial revenue from these. All right, you now know how to turn your Excel spreadsheet into a scannable barcode masterpiece. And it was probably easier than you thought. Let me know what other video topics you’d like to see down below in the comments. To watch more videos like this one, please consider subscribing and hey, happy barcoding.