Field service reps have to maintain a car stock inventory. Currently, we are emailed an Excel document (by part number) of what the powers that be say we have in our vehicles. The part number is usually 6 or 7 characters long but I don’t know if that is a hard and fast rule. We then match the part part numbers of the items we have against the Excel spread sheet annotating what we have and what we don’t have but are supposed to have. Long, slow, tedious process.
My plan is to import that spread sheet into Access and then zap the bar code labels into another table, run an unmatched query which should display all items we are supposed to have but did not zap (which means we don’t have them). So far, so good – I think. The problem I’ve run into is the bar codes have extra characters that are not part of the part number. From what I can tell, there are always 6 extra characters at the beginning of the number and 3 extra characters at the end.
For example, the part number is 773834 and the bar code returns *+H6287738341L*
I tried using Right([Part#],9) to strip the leading characters but that’s when I discovered not all part numbers are the same length so that doesn’t work right all the time. Is it possible to somehow strip the first six characters then skip to the end, count backwards by three and then strip the last three characters? (Or vice versa?)
Thanks for the help.
of the string that starts at the 7th character (thus omitting the first 6 characters) and is 9 characters shorter than the entire string (thus omitting an additional 3 characters at the end)
