How BarTender's "Toolbox" Speeds Label Design

BarTender 7.0 (since superceded by 7.1) introduced a "Toolbox" design aid that can greatly speed up label creation. Toolboxes are on-screen windows that display numerous functions in a convenient, easy-to-use list. Even better, multiple lists of functions can be defined for the user to quickly and easily switch between. We first became aware of them through our own use of Microsoft's world-renowned Visual Studio development products. The Visual Studio Toolbox supported a variety of simple and advanced design procedures with fewer menu and mouse clicks than would otherwise be required. As is often the case when we see a Windows standard we like, we decided to add the feature to BarTender, where we use it mainly for quicker object creation, easy data linking, and the creation of reusable label components.

By default, the BarTender toolbox displays along the left side of the screen (although you have the option of moving it anywhere on the screen that you want).

Bearing some resemblance to the "button"-based toolbars that have appeared along the top of Windows programs for years, toolboxes differ from toolbars in a number of key ways:

1) Toolboxes often provide multiple Window "panes" to allow users to quickly and easily switch between multiple categories of functions.

2) Toolbox options are most often stacked vertically. (In contrast, the buttons of a toolbar can typically be configured either vertically or horizontally.)

3) Whereas traditional toolbar buttons usually employ just an icon, the items in a Toolbox usually contain one or more descriptive words next to each button icon.

The Most Important
BarTender Toolbox Functions

Although the Toolbox simplifies and streamlines a variety of BarTender design functions, three in particular stand out:

1) Single-step bar code creation.
2) Easy creation of reusable "components."
3) Single-step "drag and drop" data linking.

Now, let's examine these three capabilities in a little more detail.

Nearly Instant Bar Codes

With most label software, bar code creation is at least a two-step process: first you press a key or click a button to create a "default" bar code and then you fill in a dialog window full of settings if you need anything except the "default" bar code style.

BarTender now gives you the option of instead using a single, quick mouse motion to "drag" any one of literally dozens of bar code "components" onto your label. These components define not just the bar code symbology (or language), but every single aspect of the appearance of the bar code. You can use our predefined bar code components "as is" or customize the settings as desired.

Reusable "Components"

The ability to quickly "drag and drop" bar code components into your label designs is just the beginning. You can also easily group together any combination of bar codes, text and graphics from an existing label design and save these objects together as a reusable component. That component will then appear with a name of your choice in the Components pane of the Tooblox. Anytime you want to reuse this component in a future label design, you can simply drag it from the toolbox into the label design area. By creating reusable components in this manner, you can greatly speed up the label design process anytime you have to design multiple labels that share certain common design elements.

Single-Step Data Linking

Whether it's in a BarTender label design or a Microsoft Word mail-merge document, if there's one final task that sometimes slows down users, it's specifying how external data will flow into a document. BarTender 6.0 introduced a "Database Setup Wizard" to simplify the selection of databases and tables and specify the relations between them. Now, with BarTender 7 (and higher), the Data Sources "pane" of the Toolbox greatly simplifies the task of specifying which data source items will connect to which objects on the label. A list of your available data fields is displayed in a single, convenient location in the Toolbox. All you do to connect data sources to label objects is "drag" the desired field names from the toolbox and "drop" them on top of the appropriate label objects. It makes defining your data sources about as fast and easy as it can possibly be.