Chromatography Forum

Anyone know a decent label-printer that can work simply from Microsoft Office applications?
We have had, for years, a simple database tracking samples. For years, it used a simple Brady printer to produce sample labels. The whole process was seamless and easy, the database printing directly via a Windows printer driver that knew the size of the labels and treated each as a new page.
Unfortunately the old serial-port printer got too old and eventually stopped working properly, so we sourced a replacement from Brady, but life has moved on: they no longer have an appropriate product (didn't stop them from selling us something that doesn't work, but that's another story).
Surely we can't be the only people in the world who want to print directly from Access (or Excel, or Word, or whatever) without going through specialist label software?? I mean, Word is actually designed to print labels, that's one of its functions (we're actually using Access, but anything that works for one Office product - or any other properly Windows-native software - will probably work for the entire suite). What label printers do you use? I'm grateful for any suggestions. There must be a world outside Brady, and I'm now keen to discover it.

We use a Dymo Labelwriter 400 thermal printer for labels. It has been a while since I set it up but pretty sure I had to specify the 'paper' size for the report in Access but it works fine.

I bought a Zebra GK420K Monochrome Desktop Direct Thermal Label Printer for which I also bought Wasp 633808105266 WaspLabler +2D Barcode Label Design Software and it prints on CompuLabel Direct Thermal Labels 2-inch x 1-inch 1300/roll 12xrolls per carton.

Back around 1994-1998 it was easy to get free Barcode fonts for Word off the internet and we simply printed labels using a laser printer. So, we had the sample ID in clear text and a corresponding barcode number for the sample. Easy and simple.

But when I decided to do this in 2015, it was a lot harder. There are no more free (unencumbered and uncomplicated) barcode fonts on the internet. I thought the WaspLabler software would be OK but its cumbersome and the barcodes are too spaceous for a 1"x2" label unless the text is very short. I ended up building a spreadsheet to create label strings for my ICP-MS run log and then pointing WaspLabler at the appropriate range in the run log.

Thanks enormously! I appreciate the information.