Creating Fake Barcodes in Excel

For some FOLIO workflows (for example, Course Reserves,) you may find yourself needing to add fake barcodes to items like electronic reserves. Some adopters are using the item HRID as a stand-in (since it should be unique,) but you may want to take an approach that is more standardized (since the item HRID is not available in the Fast Add workflow since it doesn't exist yet.) 

This example was done in Excel 2016.

1. In an excel sheet, copy paste your desired prefix into column A all the way down to the end of the number of barcodes you are trying to create. (Here, we're using the prefix of 'CR' because these will be used for course reserve items.)
2. In column B, type in the number and then use a formula to add 1 to the number all the way down (so you create the desired sequence).
3. In column C, use TEXT to append leading zeros and transform the number into a string,
   
   
4. in Column D, concatenate column A and Column C to create the desired barcode format:
   
   
   
   
5. Finally, copy / paste just the values from column D into Column E, so that staff can copy/paste the barcode without the formula reference.