I bought a barcode reader and have to decide what information I want to encode into it. I have to do some analysis of what I need and some kind of architectural design but I've programmed very much at all with Excel. At the top level I have stream of alphanumeric characters coming in but they are a readable and reasonably compact way of representing a binary string divided into fields where several bits represent a certain feature or piece of information. I imagine some kind of top level loop and a kind of C-style switch statement (like a nested if statement) - I don't know how to code that up for Excel yet and was hoping I could start to get some ideas about how to do that here. I don;t want to spell out the exact nature of what I'm doing but imagine that I have several products, each with their own distinct set of possible defects. Of the top of my head I imagine I will have to enter the date (a range of bar codes will be reserved for instructions to tell the Excel program what to do, e.g. I am entering a date, I am entering a product ID). Once entered the program will be in a data collection mode where I will enter an item ID and number of defects, then I will repeat this for several items until I exit the mode. I may then enter another product ID and then collect data on defects for that product. I imagine I will have some laminated sheets with barcode on - one for commands to the program and sheets for each product containing product specific defects (each defect will have an associated ID - the defect ID will use say, 8 bits). I don't know how easy it will be to handle the barcode string as a series of fields with certain bit lenghts, e.g field 1 (4 bits), field 2 (8 bits), field 3 (2 bits), etc. Can someone suggest some ideas about how to start coding this up? I did think about using Access and writing a custom application but I think Excel will do the job. Let me know if you see a major problem or have a better idea. Are there any free libraries or components I should look at?

cheers
Neil