Track equipment check-out with a barcode scanner

[DTdSSR]

Hello,

I am a relatively inexperienced Excel user, but I need to create a workbook that will do something fairly advanced. I will be using Excel 2010 and Windows 7.

Goal: I need to track the check-out and check-in of computer laptops by different users with a bar-code scanner. Each user has an ID card with a unique number, and each laptop has a bar-code with its own number. I would like for each user to scan their card then the laptop to check it out, then just re-scan the laptop when they check it in. It needs to be a fairly automatic process where I can come check the log periodically to see who has which laptop, or who checked which one out a few days prior. It's not unusual for some laptops to be out for a couple weeks while other laptops are being checked out and in daily. To complicate matters, I also can't trust the users to know which cells to highlight when they use the scanner, so I'm hoping that there's a way for the program to know which cells to populate based on whether the machine is being checked out or in (first scan vs second).

The resultant log will look something like this:

Laptop #	User	Date Out	Date In

<tbody>
</tbody>

I will have a list on another tab with the users' ID numbers and their names. I need their actual names to populate the User cells above.

Thank you in advance for considering my problem and any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated.

DT

 

[ravishankar]

How and where is the output of the scanner stored? if sheet2 has laptop# and user name in col A and B, then sheet1 col B = Vlookup($A1,Sheet2!$A$2:$B$1000,2,false) will pull the user name against their laptop number.
Ravi shankar

 

[DTdSSR]

ravishankar,

Thanks for the reply. Love your sitar work by the way

I was able to get the vlookup function to work for me, and was even able to get relevant dates to populate the correct cells so they won't change every time the workbook is opened or recalculated. So I have a working sheet now, I'm just worried that my greatest point of failure, user input, will be too prevalent since it requires the user to highlight the correct cells for input of data to work correctly. I know my users, they're smart, educated, and lazy as heck. What I'm looking to do may be too much to ask: a macro that automatically directs data input to the correct cell based on when the user scans their ID and laptop, and also doesn't change the date data once a cell has been populated (like it does with the today() or now() functions) every time the sheet recalculates.

Thanks,
DTdSSR