Need some advice please!

I have a spreadsheet that’s used for calculating scores for a kids climbing competition. Normally they have a paper scoresheet that’s signed by the route judge. Then someone goes through them and puts ‘1’ in the right cell, the spreadsheet calculates scores.

Except the event has got a bit big.. There are too many scores to enter quickly so errors creep in, and we’ve also had instances of kids faking signatures!

My solution for this is to have a load of printed cards (tokens) with barcodes (one per route), and give the competitors a plastic pocket with their name and a different barcode on it. They bring their tokens to the scoring desk, and someone can scan their pocket, then all the tokens (which get redistributed to the judges). Quicker, more accurate and no easy way to cheat.

So, I have a USB barcode reader, and a couple of laptops, but I’m not sure what to use to create the frontend and processing for the input. I want to have an onscreen prompt that waits for a “name” barcode, then finds the right line in the spredsheet and adds a ‘1’ for each token scanned.

The current spreadsheet uses formulas, so works in Excel or LibreOffice.

Do I use Excel and use VB macros – this seems the easiest way to get some basic graphic windows and find cell contents, but will only work in Excel.

Or do I try and use Calc and the slightly less well documented macro system (or try and learn Python. Might be a good opportunity to do that)

Or start from scratch and use some database system (LibreOffice Base?) which would have a steep learning curve.

Would prefer to use LibreOffice on Linux (as that’s what I have at home) but Excel seems much easier… Any opinions?

I’d use whatever is easiest with the libraries available for your USB bar code scanner as you’re not going to be writing your own driver/API…

Reckon you could massively simplify this. All you need to do is scan all the barcodes in the correct order with a phone, etc. and store the data sequentially in a spreadsheet or even text file.

The data processing can be done later with a simple script. i.e. if the code is a person, assign all subsequent route codes to them until another person code is scanned. Repeat. Might even be able to do everything with a function in Excel? (not an Excel guru!) Certainly would be a simple task in Applescript/Javascript etc

Quick google found this link with a load of phone apps that can scan & process data (rather than just scan). Haven’t looked through it yet but I will at some stage as I reckon something like this could be useful to me at work! Might even be something in there that’ll do the whole job for you! https://www.camcode.com/asset-tags/top-barcode-scanner-apps/

I used RedLaser to scan the barcodes of a load of books and save them into a spreadsheet, which was then used to find the details of each book.

Is that of any use?

Actually reading barcodes is OK – slightly to my surprise the scanner works just like a keyboard so strings of numbers followed by CR are easy to capture.

Interesting idea about reading everything in one go though. We’d need a lot more route tokens adn it means that we can’t collect before the end of the event but I’ll think about it.

I suppose my question is really about writing the macros – Excel or Calc?