How to create barcodes with Unicode text in Microsoft
Office Excel file?

In this Excel barcode generation user guide, you will learn how to create barcodes from Unicode text in Office Excel document.

• Support three 2D barcodes for Unicode text generation in Excel document: QR Code, Data Matrix and PDF-417
• Simple to add list of barcodes from Unicode text in Excel cells list
• Free distibute the Excel file with barcode inserted without font, VBA, Macro, activex programming code installed

Unicode is a text encoding standard managed by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text written in all of the world's major computer systems.

Unicode text is processed and stored as binary data by converting characters into sequences of bytes. The Unicode standard defines three common encodings: UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. UTF-8 is the most widely used in computer systems.

Microsoft Excel software supports editing, viewing Unicode text in the Excel document. OnBarcode Barcode for Excel Add-in also supports encoding unicode text in the Excel cells to 2d barcode images.

When we convert text with Unicode encode to barcodes, we usually convert unicode text to byte array first using UTF-8. Then we create barcodes with byte array data encoded.

Using OnBarcode Barcode Generator for Excel add-in, you can convert Unicode text to bytes using 4 encodes:

• UTF-8
• UTF-32
• Unicode
• BigEndian-Unicode

The following three 2D barcode symbologies supports byte array from Unicode text converted: QR Code, Data Matrix and PDF-417.

The following text and screenshots explain how to create QR Code barcode with Unicode data encoded in the Microsoft Excel file.

1. Create a new QR Code with the default properties applied


2. In Data textbox, key in Unicode (Chinese version of "hello")


3. Now you will find the background color of the Data property is in red, which means you are providing barcode data with incorrect data format. The QR Code default data mode is AUTO, which does not support Unicode text encoding.
   
   By default, the property Encode for bytes is disabled. You need change Data mode to BYTE to enable it.


4. Go to tab "2D", change the property Data mode to BYTE, click button Update to re-paint the QR Code.
   
5. Now you have successfully generated a QR Code with Unicode text encoded.