For reasons I will explain in step 2, the spreadsheet will need to be modified if you want to use a different mode. You can see that this is encoded with a 0010. Step 1: There are several "Modes" you can use, but for the purposes of this spreadsheet we will use the "AlphaNumeric" mode. To follow along, I will assume that you have not modified the original spreadsheet and "This is a test" is the string that we will encode into QR. There are many sizes of QR codes, the smallest being a 21x21 pixel matrix known as Version 1 and the version that I have created in this spreadsheet. To follow along, go to the "Generate QR" tab. If you want to know how this all works, below is some explanation. Everything you need is in the tab "QR Code." Just enter text (up to 15 characters long) in the yellow box (Cell Y36) and the codes will be generated. If you just want to generate the QR codes and not worry about the details of how it's done, just download the spreadsheet by clicking hereĀ and you can just use it standalone. You can also link to the Google Spreadsheet if you don't have Excel: Click here to download the Excel spreadsheet to follow along.
I will describe here the steps used to generate the code in Excel. As a challenge, I set a goal of doing this without using any Visual Basic or other scripting. Being the Excel junkie that I am, I thought it would be easy to create a proof-of-concept entirely in Excel.
How to encode a message with a matrix how to#
For a little project I'm working on, I needed to understand how to generate QR codes.