Masking Barcode Characters

You may find it helpful to mask all but certain characters from a barcode scan. This is useful when you have a series of characters on your barcode that never change and you don't want to type them each time you perform a scan.

  1. Access the Settings screen.

  2. Click Add Mask.

  3. From the new row of From and To values, type a range of characters to keep exposed. If needed, you can do this multiple times to expose different ranges. Inspect masks all other characters in the barcode.

  4. From the Home screen, click Scan Part.

  5. From the Scan Part dialog box, in the Scan or Paste ID box, type only the exposed characters to access the measurement routine.

  6. Click Look Up.

Suppose your barcodes each consist of 18 characters, similar to this:

PART1-IT-0039-8765

Next, suppose that "-IT-0039-", or characters 6 through 13 (including the dashes), never change between those barcodes. In this case, you don't want to have to specify those characters each time you use the Scan Part dialog box. For efficiency, you only want to worry about characters 1 through 5 and 14 to 18.

You can click Add Mask twice to mask all but these exposed characters:

From: 1 To: 5

From: 14 To: 18

This results in characters 6 through 13 being masked.

After you add the mask, in the Scan Part dialog box, if you then type PART1-8765 and click Look Up, Inspect recognizes the barcode and opens the routine associated with it.