BarTender 7.5 Launched with
a Variety of New Features

BarTender 7.5 was released in early September. Many of the new capabilities are geared toward simplifying label design, but there are also new capabilities for data access, data parsing and image handling, among others. Also, because the new version now employs “software activation” (please see separate, dedicated article), the need for hardware keys, previously used with certain editions, are now optional for those editions.

What follows (below) is a discussion and brief analysis of the most important of the new features.

For a more condensed list of the new features in 7.5, please see our Version 7.5 Summary.

For the most detailed technical description and analysis, please view our Version 7.5 White Paper.

Wizards Speed Setup of New Labels
As easy as it is to lay out the text, bar codes, and other elements of a BarTender label design, we’ve learned over the years that some new users can still use some extra help with Step #1: Properly defining the blank label and, when possible, defining their printer connection before they start designing. Issues that come up include:

• How does the die-cut label size differ from the “liner” size?
• Are there multiple labels per page?
• Is there any space between those labels?
• Is the printing going to be done by a thermal label printer or a laser “page” printer?

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When you ponder all of the parameters that must be defined just to specify a blank label, it becomes easier to imagine why new users sometimes have questions. That’s the whole reason for BarTender’s “New Label” wizard. Experienced users that prefer traditional, manual label set-up can simply “cancel” the wizard. However, most users will find that the New Label wizard significantly streamlines the setup process and leads to label designs that are more easily performance-optimized for the intended target printers. The simple one-step-at-a-time questions are presented in logical order and with helpful illustrations when appropriate.

Wizards for EAN.UCC Application Identifiers
It’s not just beginners that benefit from well-thought-out wizards. If you talk to experienced users that have done advanced label designs, one of the biggest challenges you will hear about is how best to structure label designs to handle the tricky “application identifiers” demanded by a variety of EAN.UCC compliance label specifications. The published standard describes a variety of data prefixes that are embedded in front of bar code data fields to inform data management software what kind of data fields are encoded (and therefore how to interpret them). Although BarTender has long excelled at the handling of multiple data sources, the simple fact is that the EAN.UCC Application Identifier standard is long and complicated. It defines a great variety of identifiers and even allows multiple instances to be combined within a single bar code. BarTender’s new Application Identifier wizard greatly simplifies this data formatting challenge by asking questions in a logical, streamlined order to minimize the amount of thought required and unburden users from having to sort through and understand the specification’s detailed nuances.

OLE DB Database Connectivity Added
BarTender was the first label software package to offer its users the power and flexibility of Microsoft’s Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) standard. Well, technology keeps changing and some software integrators now prefer to use the newer OLE DB standard for their database connectivity. (In supporting OLE DB, BarTender 7.5 continues to provide its well-proven ODBC capabilities as well.)

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User-definable Background Images
Sometimes it’s desirable to have background imagery on a label but not treat it as a conventional “label object.” That way, additional items can be laid down “on top of” the background and manipulated without any confusion regarding which items have been clicked on with the mouse cursor. For example, you may want some text printed on a CD to appear in front of a background photograph (or other image).

Here's another example that has led some users to request the background image feature:

Some users like to manually import into BarTender a graphic image of label formats originally designed in other label programs to help them design a new label format inside of BarTender. By making a graphic image or a scan of their original label and placing that in BarTender as a background image, they can then quickly and easily design the new BarTender label “on top of” that background. Later, when the new label design is complete, the background image can be deleted.

Background image features include:

• Use picture graphics or a background “color” (or both).
• Design “on top of” backgrounds without any interference with label objects.
• “Bleed” images beyond label edges to ensure full coverage in case of label slippage or poor printer registration.

Support for Printer Clocks
BarTender has long supported time and date “stamping” using data read from the computer’s real-time clock. However, in some applications, optimal label printing performance is achieved by downloading label formats from the PC to the printer, from where it may get printed for hours or even days without any further communication from the PC. Accordingly, in order to optimize printing in this manner while also using time-stamping, label designs need to be able to generate data based on the real time clock provided by many printers. BarTender 7.5 users can now make use of the real time clocks from either or both the printer and the PC.

Preview and Print Label Designs without Opening Label Formats
The traditional way to load and print documents in Windows is to run the appropriate Windows application, load the desired document, and then select File, Print. A quicker way to load the document is simply to double-click on it using the Windows Explorer. However, if all you need to do is print a label format “as is,” BarTender now offers an even faster alternative. Without explicitly loading BarTender, just by using Windows Explorer, users can view detailed “thumbnail” views of all the label formats in a Windows folder. When a desired format is located, users can quickly print it by right-clicking the image preview and selecting “print.” Users preferring to print from within BarTender will find that the thumbnail previews now offered by BarTender 7.5 are more detailed than that seen in earlier BarTender versions.

New Software Activation
To learn more about this new feature, which manages software license authentication and makes hardware keys optional in the editions that used them, please see the separate, dedicated article.

Other New Features

• “Auto-completion” for filenames typed into dialog boxes.
• New wizard simplifies connecting to a database.
• Managing multiple “substrings” is now easier and more intuitive.

For the most detailed technical feature description, please view our Version 7.5 White Paper.