Help you can search

September 1, 2026

Help has a search box on every page, and the pages themselves are shorter to read — a list of steps you can take in at a glance, with the words behind each one a tap away. The handheld scanner page also names the scanners that have been tested, straight about the ones that cannot read a printed label.

Open a line to read the whole story behind it.

• New Every help page now has a search box, and it forgives a mistyped word.

  Help had grown to sixteen pages, and finding the one that answers your question meant knowing which of them it was. There is now a search box in the bar at the top of every one of them, so the question can be asked from wherever you are rather than from the front page. It searches the whole of what is written — not only the page names, but every step, every note and every aside — and it reaches the public pages too, so asking here how your data is kept finds the page that answers it. It also forgives you: type scaner and you get the handheld scanner page, because somebody typing one-handed at a shelf gets a letter wrong and a search that answers "nothing" is one you stop using. Each result shows the line that matched, which usually settles which page you meant without opening any of them. Two words narrow the answer rather than widening it, and a page named for what you asked comes first.

• Improved Every walkthrough now opens as a short list of steps, and a step unfolds when you want the whole story.

  The five walkthroughs had grown into a wall of text: a dozen steps, a paragraph under every one of them, and a list of things worth knowing at the bottom, all of it open at once. Standing at a shelf with your hands full, that is a page you skim and leave. Each step is now a single line — the thing to do — and unfolds onto the paragraph saying why it matters and what it looks like when it goes wrong. The things worth knowing fold away under their own heading in the same way, and a picture folds with the step it belongs to. Two things deliberately stay open: what the page is about, at the top, and the warning box, because that is the one everybody needs to have read before they decide something is broken. Nothing was shortened and nothing was thrown away — the same words, with the long ones out of the way until you ask for them.

• Improved The handheld scanner help page now ends with a table of the scanners that have been tested, and says which kind will never read your own labels.

  The page walked you through setting a scanner up, and one of its notes was wrong about the thing that decides whether a scanner is any use to you at all. It said a scanner reads the barcodes on packaging and the codes this app prints alike, so one device covers both. Half of them do not. The cheaper handhelds sweep a red line across a striped barcode and have nothing that could see a QR code, which is what every label here carries: they read your deliveries perfectly and never your own shelves, and nothing in the booklet changes it. The page now ends with a short table of the scanners themselves, each with how far it has been tested here, over a link to the full list of what this app works with. It is not a recommendation and will never become one — this app does not tell you what to buy, only what has been tried here and what came of it. The note has been rewritten to say what to look for on the box — 2D, QR or imager — and the step where you prove the scanner works now asks for two scans instead of one: a packet, and a label printed here. The first proves nothing about the second.

• Improved The list of what this app works with now answers for a laser scanner that reads striped barcodes only.

  That page had an entry for a USB handheld and one for the model somebody here has actually run, and nothing at all about the difference that decides whether either is any use to you: whether the scanner can see a QR code. There is an entry for it now, marked as working in part rather than not working — a laser reads the barcode on an arriving carton, which is a real job here, and never a label this app printed. The two entries above it now say the same thing from their side, and the reason sits with them: it is what the optics can see rather than a setting, so it is decided when you buy and not afterwards.