*** THIS POST RELATES TO THE FREE COPY OF EMEDIA SHIPPED WITH EVOLIS PRINTERS ONLY ***

From time to time eMedia may lose contact with its printer and start to complain about a license key. This is a red herring and there is no license key. The physical printer itself is the key.

When this starts to happen, it looks like this:

To recover from this, you need to open the File menu and choose Print Setup. Then use the drop-down control to select your Evolis printer:

Press OK on the Print Setup screen and then put the software into Design Mode (second button in on the big toolbar at the top). Here you will see a big DEMO button on the end of the toolbar:

Press the DEMO button and the following screen will show up:

Click the button labelled “Disable Demo Mode” and eMedia will return to normal.

Note that you can use Demo Mode to check out the full features of eMedia and even use it to design cards on a different computer. eMedia allows itself to be installed and used on as many machines as you like, the only restriction is that the only one that will print properly (without the overlay mark) is the one connected to your Evolis printer.

At the heart of every ID card printing operation should be a database. This is where you store information about your staff, students or service users and it allows you to recall this information quickly and easily for checking of reprinting of identity cards.

I use the term database loosely, the free copy of eMedia that comes with the Evolis Pebble only supports Excel worksheets as a data source and this is what I am going to talk you through in this post. Don’t worry if you don’t have a copy of Excel, like me, you can use the open source Libre Office to create the required file.

You may already have a spreadsheet or a database with your information in it but as an example I am going to start from scratch. The first thing to do is to create a new spreadsheet and populate it with the information you need. At this stage, it could be as simple as just entering column headings to take data from eMedia:

As you can see, I’ve entered some simple information into the spreadsheet. Don’t forget to add the blank column to contain the link to the photographs if you want photos on the cards.

Once you have your spreadsheet, save it somewhere on your computer, making sure that you save it in Excel 97/2000/XP/2003 format, making it a .xls file. Make sure that you close your spreadsheet program before continuing.

Next, fire up your copy of eMedia and put it into design mode, using the 2nd icon in the large bar at the top. From there, you can select ‘Database connection’ from the tools menu:

This will start up the Database Connection Wizard. The first screen is just for information, click next to continue.

The second screen lets you select which data source type you wish to import from. As you can see, the full version of eMedia can connect to a wide variety of data sources while the free one is limited to Excel. Select 97-2003 for a standard .xls file and 2007 for the more modern .xlsx:

The next screen allows you to choose your spreadsheet. Click the ‘…’ button by the end of the text box and use the standard file dialog to select your spreadsheet file:

This next screen can be a little confusing when you see it for the first time. It is asking for a password if you have set one on your spreadsheet. If your sheet is unprotected (default), leave these boxes blank and click next:

This screen is asking you how you wish to access the data. View and SQL statement refer to accessing true databases, so for a spreadsheet we will leave this as Table access and the cursor as Keyset:

Since speadsheet files can contain multiple sheets, you will need to tell it which one contains the data you wish to use. You can do this on the next screen:

The next screen is to do with permissions when eMedia is run in operating mode. These refer to whether the operator is allowed to modify, add and delete records from the data source while running as an operator. Generally, you will want to allow them to at least modify and add records. The only time you would not want them to have any of these permissions is if you have a large pre-vetted data source and you are only doing a batch print run:

This screen allows you to hide data fields from the operator when in operator mode. You might want to hide fields that contain similar information that the operator does not need to edit; for example, when capturing pictures and printing cards for students at a university enrolment there might be a ‘job title’ field that contains the data ‘Student’ for every record in the data set. It would be sensible to hide this from the operator because it is an unnecessary distraction for the operator and they have no reason to edit it:

The next screen is nearly identical, but refers to whether the operator may or may not edit the field in question. If before, you allowed the operator to see the field filled with data ‘Student’, you may wish to disallow them to edit the data:

This screen determines the sort order of the records as presented to the operator. Set this to the main field you use to identify your records. This may be surname, or ID number:

This next screen can be a little confusing but is very important. Most people want to have pictures on their ID badges and it is very good to have these stored and linked to records in the data set. On the left drop-down choose ‘Create a new object’, on the right drop-down choose the field in your data set that is going to hold the picture (this is held as a link in the data to the picture file on disk) and then press Add/Remove. This will then link the picture object on the card to the storage in the data:

And you’re done. You can now view a preview of your data set, as it is to be presented to the operator, or just click ‘Finish’ to close the wizard and start designing your card template:

Our next technical blog post will cover how to start designing your template for your cards.