Bartender is a great label program, but it can be tricky trying to figure out which edition you need.

Seagull Scientific currently has no less than six editions, from the incredibly powerful enterprise Print Server down to the (very) Basic Edition.

Like most of the label software companies, Seagull has published charts of all the features in each edition, but this can get confusing.

In an attempt to make it easier for potantial customers, Seagull has come up with an interactive version of their Features and Editions Comparison Chart. Check it out here!

To be honest, I find that the thing about BarTender that most confuses my clients is the difference in licensing between the Pro and Enterprise editions. You’ll note that this is the very top item in the chart.

Do you use BarTender or are you thinking of using it? Need help with determining which edition you need? Let me know what you think.

Winco ID is a business partner of Seagull Scientific, we have been providing and supporting Bartender with great success!

Keeping label files under control

 
Let’s face it – in a lot of businesses, there isn’t good control of the different label files that are used.
 
Often labels are stored on the hard drives of individual PCs and even if kept in a shared folder, the labels are often altered without the correct control procedures being followed.
 
When a company has a number of locations, keeping control of the files and changes to them becomes very important.
 
To help with this, our friends at Seagull Scientific have come up with a new application called BarTender Librarian. The idea behind Librarian is to allow groups of designers, users and administrators work together to manage the storage and revisions of label files.

Librarian improves security by keeping al the labels in a secure database structure, rather than having loose files scattered around on different PCs. An approval workflow can be set up that ensures labels cannot be used until they have passed through the correct procedures and revisions can be easily managed.

Bartender Librarian is just one of the applications included in the Bartender Suite. It just keeps getting better.

Want to learn more about Bartender label software and how it can simplify your labeling operations? Just give me a call at 603-598-1553 x237

For as long as I can remember, Datamax has included a copy of BarTender label software on the CD that comes with their new printers.

Starting this month that will change.

Instead of the BarTender install, Datamax provides a list of label software companies that are compatible with the printer.

This isn’t really a big deal – the version of BarTender that was included worked fine for 30 days, then became an edition called UltraLite. Believe me this was really light in features – enough to make it pretty much unusable. For anyone using the program, this would almost certainly mean having to purchase an edition of BarTender with more features.

In any case, if you have a new Datamax printer (if you do you are one of the lucky few, considering the horribly long lead times right now) and need to source label software, I’ll be happy to help you out.

Give me a call at 603-598-1553 x237 to get your BarTender software.

So our friends at Seagull Scientific have been busy again. Bartender has been my label design software of choice for as long as I can remember and it keeps getting better.

The latest version 9.2 has just been released and it includes a new look and a host of new features.

The arrival of Windows 7 makes this a great time to release a new version that is compatable with Microsoft’s latest OS. The designers have also taken the opportunity to revamp the UI bring in a new icon set.

A while ago, Seagull started to enhance the value of Bartender by introducing companion applications and some new ones are added this time.

BarTender Librarian application lets large groups of designers, administrators and other users  manage the storage and revision of label formats and other files. Perfect for businesses where the label design process needs to be controlled for security and revision control.

Print Station is another companion applicaiton, this one allows operators to carry out simple print jobs without ever having to open the label design program – a nice addition to the collection.

We have been using Bartender 9.2 for a few days for our own print jobs and it is working really well with no issues – just as we expected.

To learn more about all the changes in Bartender 9.2, see this Whitepaper from Seagull.

What label software do you prefer to use? Do you upgrade when new versions arrive or keep with your current install?

It’s no secret – I’m a fan of Seagull’s Bartender label design software and I use it everyday. One of the features I really like is the fact that a database dummy such as myself can easily connect my labels to a datasource to populate my labels with the info I need.

Quite often we are printing labels for clients and they provide the data in Excel spreadsheets. 99% of the time this works perfectly, the other 1% has been killing me.

So yesterday I’m setting up to print some MIL-STD-130 UID labels for one of the big defense contractors. The customer had kindly sent me a spreadsheet with all the data for the 500 or so labels he needed. It took just a few minutes to tweak the template and connect to the spreadsheet.

Looking good, time to print. Before I run a job I always do a preview to make sure that there will be no strange issues with any of the labels. In this case there was a problem, some of the serial numbers refused to be seen by Bartender. Indeed, any serial number that contained any letters would not show up in Bartender at all.

I’ve seen this kind of thing happen before and when I’ve spoken with the Seagull guys they’ve told me that it is a Microsoft issue and is well known. Not sure I buy into this, I would have thought that if there is a problem like this in Excel it would have been fixed by now. In anycase, doesn’t help me with my problem.

I tried all the usual things, formatting the cells as text rather than numbers etc., but no progress, numeric serial numbers were fine, add a letter or two and the field was left blank.

In the past, I’ve worked around this by using Access instead of Excel. As I mentioned, I’m a database dummy so having to use a proper database program is not good as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, I solved the problem a different way – I simply saved the spreadsheet as a tab delimited text file, connect this file to the label and “Hey Presto” works great.

So I still have no idea why Excel and Bartender don’t seem to like each other from time to time, but at least there is a simple workaround. That’s today’s Tech Tip.

If you use Bartender have you run into this problem? If you have a better solution than mine please share!

The guys over at Seagull have come up with a Service Release (SR1) for Bartender version 9.1.

To be fair there are no Earth shattering changes, but any improvements that help with our barcode labeling are always welcome.

As well as bug fixes, the update includes the translations for the Bartender Security Center (was only available in English when first shipped) and support for SQL Server 2008.

Head over to the Seagull site to get more info and to download. Note that if you have Bartender 9.1 already, the update is free – if you have an older version you’ll need to purchase an upgrade to 9.1 – as it happens we can help with that!

The guys over at Seagull Scientific have released a new version of Bartender – 9.01.

Anyone trying to activate 9.0 will be sent to download the newer release.

Seagull has provided full details of the problems fixed in 9.01 (as well as the download links) on this page.

If you have purchased Bartender 9.0, the Activation Code that you received with your software remains the same. Most of the installation CD’s currently in the supply chain will be for 9.0 so there will be a lot of downloading going on. Actually, my version of Bartender is 9.0 so I’ll be downloading too!

If (like me) you have already activated Bartender 9.0, you should have received an email from Seagull with a link to the 9.01 download. This is assuming that you had registered the software as part of the activation process. If you didn’t get the email, just download 9.01 from the Seagull Site.

For more information, head over to the Seagull news page.

Looking to upgrade from a previous version to 9.x? contact me at david@labelingnews.com and we will be happy to help.