Barcode scanning issue

[Stephen1]

Hi - I’m new to the community and deeply inexperienced in the world of app design.

I am trying to create an app and a set of scannable membership cards for a kids music charity so that we can track attendance at the music workshops easily and safely in these pandemic days and also collect door fees without using cash as has been the case up to know. I have based the app on the template provided by Appsheet and it seems to work well. For the I created 9 letter/number ID codes for each member on the Excel spreadsheet and then used an online Code 39 barcode generating website to create barcode images for each of them. I can paste these into mock up membership cards and it works perfectly.

However I want now to create a large number of cards and I’m trying to do this within Microsoft Word using Mailmerge to extract members ID data from the Excel spreadsheet that supports the new app and print them onto card labels. I thought I would be able to generate the barcodes by simply using a bar code font to ‘translate’ the 9 character ID codes in my Word document. I have downloaded Libre 39 and a couple of other fonts, but the app scanning function is not recognising the barcodes at all. I suspect the explanation is trivial and that I am doing something stupid, but I am not making much progress and so wondered if anyone can help?

Thanks

[Austin]

Just a heads up on your collecting door fees without using cash, appsheet does not have any payment capability so you’d have to have some other way of collecting fees. No idea on the why barcode fonts don’t work, try making a single id in a barcode generator and then your typed barcode and see if you can tell any difference. Might be some required starting and ending character or something.

[Stephen1]

Thanks for the quick reply - yes I’m aware that we can’t collect money through app sheet, but all we need to do is log attendances and the spreadsheet will do the rest, calculating what is owed. Families will pay in advance and the fees will be deducted as they attend. I guess special characters could be the problem and I’ll look into that.

[Stephen1]

Thanks again for advice - all working now as expected. There were actually three different issues - the first was that I was using lower case letters in my spreadsheet IDs - the Libre 39 code only seems to deal with caps and so I needed to convert them to caps. The second was that I hadn’t realised that I needed to include asterisk characters at the beginning and end of the codes as start and stop signals, and the last was that for some reason when I selected the code for translation into Code39 an extra piece of barcode was being added in at the end of the whole thing that I couldn’t delete. However when I highlighted that section and turned the font back into regular text (blank) it solved the problem. A frustrating couple of hours but it will save many more being able to print all the cards ink one batch.