The Remark Report

If you used Google yesterday you may have noticed that it was the “birthday” of barcodes.  Barcodes are a series of lines and spaces, different sequences of which make up a piece of data.  Barcodes are not readable by the human eye – but are readable by optical scanners and some scanning software.  Remark Office OMR and Remark Classic OMR both support barcode recognition.  But what is the purpose of a barcode?

Most people probably associate barcodes with supermarket checkouts.  With a barcode scanner, they provide a way to interpret machine-printed data, and were an obvious boost to productivity in tracking inventory,  pricing, and customer service for the stores that adopted them.  But barcoding was such an inexpensive and efficient method for acquiring data that it was implemented by many other industries including ours. 

Today, many Remark customers use barcodes on their forms for a variety of reasons.  They can be used for form identification or for preprinting static or variable information on a form that will become part of the data set.  As form identifiers, barcodes can be used for separating and indexing individual form types, form pages, and respondents.  This way, you can ensure that the data from forms you are scanning will be associated with the correct database, page or respondent in case they are fed out of order, fed upside-down, or simply get mixed in with other forms.

Barcodes can contain data that is merged from nearly any outside data source such as Excel or Access.   Using the mail merge option in Microsoft Word and the Code 39 font provided by Remark Office OMR, information can be read from a spreadsheet or database and printed on your forms.  This way, information that you already know about a respondent can be included in your data set and used in reports. .  For example, if you already know your respondents zip code, age, gender, etc.  – you don’t have to include those fields on the form itself.  You can use a unique ID to go to a database and merge that data into Remark’s database.

For more information on barcodes and how they can be used for page, form and respondent identification and tracking please sign up for our upcoming support webinar. The webinar will be held on October 15, 2009, 2:00PM EDT/EST. Click here to sign up for a webinar. Once we receive your request, we will contact you for confirmation.

October 15, 2009, 2:00PM EDT/EST:
Do you need to process mixed form types at the same time? Have your pages or respondents ever gotten out of order, and you have to sort all of the papers prior to scanning? Join us for this webinar to learn how to utilize form, page and respondent tracking to identify form types, form pages and respondents so that mixed batches of forms can be scanned at the same time. You can easily apply marks, barcodes or text to your forms to tell the software the form, specific page within a form or respondent in order to collate all of your data together into logical data sets.

This webinar will utilize Remark Office OMR 7 and assumes template creation knowledge.

Click here to sign up for a webinar. Once we receive your request, we will contact you for confirmation.