A spreadsheet of products, and a scanner you can let go of

August 31, 2026

Products can now be added a spreadsheet at a time, with the whole sheet shown before anything is added. The scanner settings can hand every scanner back, the test area shows what one sent over either kind of connection, and a handheld that was tried on the real thing is named on the page saying what this works with.

Open a line to read the whole story behind it.

• New Fill in a spreadsheet and add a whole shelf of products at once, after seeing exactly what it would add.

  Adding forty things one form at a time was the longest job in the app. The products list now has an Import button beside Export. It hands you a spreadsheet with a column for every field — a part number, a name, how it is tracked, its unit, how long it keeps, a barcode, suppliers and categories — with as many empty rows as you ask for and, if you want one, a filled-in row to copy. Fill it in with whatever you have; LibreOffice Calc and Microsoft Excel both open it, and it comes back as .xlsx, .ods or .csv. Send it back and nothing is added yet. You get the whole sheet on screen first, row by row, with anything that would not work said in plain words beside the value that caused it: a part number already in use, a part number used twice in the same sheet, a category you do not have, a unit that is not one. Every value is a box you can correct there and then, every row has a tick you can clear to leave it out, and Check again re-reads the lot. Only once every ticked row is fit does the Add button appear — and it adds all of them or none of them.

• New A Forget every scanner button in the scanner settings, which hands back every scanner this browser was allowed to read.

  Allowing a scanner is something your browser remembers, and until now nothing in the app could take that back — the only way was a settings page inside the browser that almost nobody finds, which made a wrong choice feel permanent. There is now a Forget every scanner button beside the two connect buttons. It gives up every scanner allowed on that browser at once, empties the test area, and disappears again because there is nothing left to forget. Nothing is lost by pressing it: connecting again is the same one press and the same list. It is worth reaching for when you want to try the other kind of connection, when you have moved to a different scanner, or when you are handing the computer to somebody else.

• Improved The page listing what this works with now names a handheld barcode scanner somebody has actually run, rather than only saying that handhelds work in general.

  Until now that page could say only that a USB handheld works in general, with the caveat that scanners do not all wrap a barcode the same way and yours might be one that needs checking. It now also names one that was tried: a Netum C750, read correctly in both of the modes a handheld can be taken out of keyboard mode into — HID-POS and virtual COM. The general line keeps its caveat, because it still speaks for every scanner nobody has held; the new line is there so that somebody about to buy one can see a model that has been. HID-POS is the one to set first, because nothing has to be installed on the computer for it.

• Fixed The scanner test area now shows the raw bytes and names the device when a scanner is connected as a virtual COM port, instead of leaving both blank.

  Connect a handheld the second way — as a virtual COM port rather than a point-of-sale device — and the test area used to answer two of its own questions with nothing. The raw bytes were never shown, because the text was being read out of the connection before anything could keep the bytes it came from; and the device was called "Unnamed device" every time, because a scanner granted on an earlier visit was picked up again without asking what it was. Both are filled in now. A scanner connected this way can only ever be named by the two numbers a computer identifies it with, something like 1a86:7523, because that kind of connection carries no model name at all — connect the same scanner the other way and you get the name its maker gave it. And a row of the test area with nothing in it yet now takes its own heading with it, rather than leaving a label sitting over a gap that reads as something having gone wrong.