Request for Assistance - Barcodes

[hansolo77]

Looking for some help guys.  Anybody use OpenOffice?  It's the free alternative to Microsoft Office.  I'm looking for a way to add barcodes to a spreadsheet I'm working on. 

At work, every "period" (month) we get a new order guide.  It's 60 pages, front and back (so really 120) of everything possible we can order for our department.  It's just a really big spreadsheet, with boxes for you to indicate each day if you need the item or not, and a barcode next to it for you to scan into the computer to order.  So last year, this team of experts came in to try to make things a little less stressful.  They identified this order guide as a pain in the ass, and developed an easier guide for me to use.  Their solution was to photocopy each page, then use some scissors and tape to cut each item we really carry in the department out, and put together a new order guide with just our stuff.  It's great, I love it.  Problem is, we're now about 10 months beyond that guide.  Our corporate office as demanded we start carrying new items that's not in this guide, as well as removing stuff that's no longer needed.  So now we're playing with a guide that has maybe 20% of the items scratched out so we don't order it, and then we're going back to the "monthly" guide to scan in the new items every day.  Since I'm on vacation, I suggested I could do one better, since that team of experts has moved on to other departments and refuses to come back and help us make a new guide.  My goal was to use my flatbed scanner, make a digital copy on the computer of each page, and use Photoshop to create the new guide, rather than scissors and tape.  I spent 4 hours yesterday scanning every page.  It looked great on the computer.  But after doing my cut/paste job for the first page, the print out was really bad.  I don't know what happened, but it looks like the scanning process may have picked up the bleed through from the back side of each page (because the original guide is printed front and back).  So while all the words are legible, the barcodes are unscanable.  So doing a scan won't work (because my scanner is too good I guess lol)  My go-to solution was to just make a new spreadsheet.  I have it exactly how I want it, and it looks awesome.  The problem is, I have no way to add the barcodes, which defeats the entire purpose.  I thought about maybe using a barcode font but I don't know our readers can actually scan it.  I have a personal barcode reader I use for scanning in new comic books.  It was unable to read it.  So my next venture was to try and find a barcode generator online.  There are TONS, with different formats to chose from.  I picked one that looked very similar to the one we have and generated the image.  But when I tried to add it to the spreadsheet, it wouldn't fit.  I tried to shrink it down to fit in the cell, then it became pixelated and unscanable.  I'm completely lost.  What I need to find is something like a plugin for OpenOffice that will generate barcodes for me.  Trouble is, I only found a few such plugins and they have horrible reviews.  The only one that gets anything decent actually costs money.

So I'm asking the nerd guys here for some help.  Do you know of any such utility I can use to generate barcodes that would actually be usable?

I just thought of another solution......  I believe they have the spreadsheet saved as a PDF document on the corporate server.  If I can somehow manage to get a copy of that PDF (like on a flash drive), is there any way I can edit the PDF?  Or is there maybe some program that converts PDF pages into separate high-resolution images?  If I can convert it to images, then I can go back to my original Photoshop idea.