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# Printing barcodes in bulk

If you want to give your items, your equipment or your stock locations a barcode label, Robaws prints those labels **one at a time**, always from the record itself.

||| Printing a list of barcodes in one go is not possible in Robaws. There is no action that turns several items into a single sheet of labels. If you want a whole run of labels, you export your items to Excel and build the sheet in external label software. How to do that is described further down this article.

## Printing one label

Open the record and click the **barcode** action button. Robaws creates a pdf and opens it in a new tab, ready to print.

That works in four places:

| Record | What ends up on the label | Where the code lives |
| ---- |
| Item | The name, the item number and the code | The **barcode** field on the item |
| Equipment | The name and the code | The **serialnumber** field on the equipment |
| Installation | The name and the code | The **serialnumber** field on the installation |
| Stock location | The name and the code | The **name** of the stock location itself |

The pdf is an A4 in landscape format with the data large and centred. So there is **one label per page**: you either cut the label out or you stick the A4 onto the rack.

|| If there is no code on the record yet, you get a pdf with only the name and the number on it, without a barcode. So fill in the code first. How to do that, and how to have Robaws generate a code for you, is described in [working with barcodes](https://support.robaws.com/en/article/working-with-barcodes-ixufpl/).

## Choosing barcode 128 or QR code

Via **settings > general > settings** you choose, in the **barcode** field, how the code is drawn on the label: **barcode 128** (the classic bar code) or a **QR code**. By default this is set to QR code, and the choice applies to your whole organisation.

|| If you let Robaws generate the barcode, you get a code of 36 characters made up of letters, digits and hyphens. A code that long does not sit well on a classic bar code: as **barcode 128** the label becomes very wide and hard to scan. So if you work with barcode 128, fill in a short code yourself — the EAN number, for instance, or your own item number. For a **QR code** the length makes no difference.

## Printing several labels

Robaws supplies the data, the external software prints the sheet. Three steps.

###### 1. Check your barcodes in the items overview

Go to the **items** module and add the **barcode** column to your overview. Sort on that column: the items without a code then end up together, so you can fill those in first. How to add columns and keep filters is described in [using overview screens](https://support.robaws.com/en/article/using-overview-screens-10zscoo/).

Then filter on the items you want labels for, by item group, by supplier or by stock location, for instance.

###### 2. Export to Excel

Click the **Excel** action button at the top of the overview. Robaws exports the lines that your filters, your search term and your sorting produce. That file holds, among others, the **name**, **item nr.** and **barcode** columns — exactly the three pieces of data you need on a label.

|| The export follows your **filters**, not your **selection**. Ticking lines therefore does not limit the export: if you only want part of it, use a filter. One export contains a maximum of 50,000 lines.

If you want labels for your equipment, do the same in the **equipment** module. There too, the Excel export holds a column with the code.

###### 3. Build the label sheet in label software

Open your label software, choose the label format of your label sheets and load your Excel file as the data source. Then use the **mail merge** function to create one label per item. You place the fields on the label yourself — usually the name, the item number and the code as a bar code or QR code — and you decide the font size and the size of the code.

Do you not have software yet? Herma provides [free online label software](https://www.herma.nl/etiket/webwinkel/online-software/) into which you can load an Excel file.

| Always check the print preview first: the number of labels must match the number of items exported, and every item must carry its own code. Then scan one test label before you print the full sheet.

## What you do with the barcodes

Once the labels are on, you scan them in the Robaws App for your stock management and in Wappy to record materials used on a work order. What Robaws does with a scanned code is described in [working with barcodes](https://support.robaws.com/en/article/working-with-barcodes-ixufpl/).