Learn how to quickly generate personalised QR codes for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint that reflect your brand or personality.
Do you need to create branded QR codes for your business, event or conference? In this post we’ll take a look at some of the options available.
Option 1: Use an Office 365 add-in
One of the easiest ways to create QR codes for your Office documents is by using an Office 365 add-in. These can be installed from Microsoft’s app marketplace, AppSource.
Office add-ins allow you to interact with your document contents without the need to open additional tabs or windows. In general, they work across desktop Office apps and the web-based document editors.
We offer an app on AppSource where you can create QR codes for Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Alternatively there’s a number of other providers offering similar apps that you can also explore.
Option 2: Use a website
If you only need to create a QR code infrequently, then you might want to instead explore using a QR code generator website. Searching will reveal thousands of websites that allow you to specify the data you want to encode in a QR code, and generate it.
To insert this in your document, in most case you’ll just need to right-click on the image and select ‘Copy’. Then you should be able to paste the image within your file.
Option 3: Use an API
Microsoft has introduced an IMAGE function that is now available in most newer versions of Excel. This allows you to easily call an API such as ours that generate a QR code and can embed it within your Excel spreadsheet cells.
This is especially helpful if you need to generate multiple QR codes at once, as you can write a formula and share it between rows and columns in your spreadsheet.
Simply enter the following formula in a cell, and you’ll see an example of what this looks like:
=IMAGE("https://qrcodegenerator.api.littleappy.co/qrcode/basic?errorCorrectionLevel=Q&fileType=jpeg&size=400&content=https://littleappy.co")
As this is an Excel function you can easily customise it to generate QR codes based on different values within your Excel sheets. Note that it can be a little tricky to download all of these at once.
There’s a few things to be aware of if using the IMAGE function. Redirects won’t work due to security concerns, nor will URLs requiring authentication.
There’s also a limit of 255 characters, so if you’re working with a URL longer than that you’ll need to use two columns - one that contains the URL as a string (ie. Column A), and the other that uses the IMAGE function to render the QR codes (Column B). When creating the formula for Column B, ensure you reference the row in Column A for the URL, eg:
=IMAGE(A1)