Excel Label Generator for a Steel Manufacturer

A steel manufacturing business needed product labels printed on the shop floor. They did not need a system — they needed a file that opens on the machine already in the office and prints the right thing.

The workbook

We built LabelMaker.xlsx: an Excel workbook that generates A5 labels, two per A4 portrait page, each carrying the company logo and separated by a cut line.

• Sequential lot numbers that restart at 1 for each order.
• Dropdowns for product code, description and quantity, with manual entry available when something falls outside the list.
• An editable Products sheet, so the client adds and changes his own products without coming back to us.

It shipped with a written how-to guide, a sample output PDF and a layout preview image.

The print problem

The interesting part was printing. The client reported blank pages when running a batch of eight labels — a class of fault that has several plausible causes and only one real one. We worked through page-break behaviour, paper size and manually inserted breaks in turn until an eight-label batch produced exactly four pages, and had the client confirm it on his own printer rather than assume it from ours.

Where it went next

Once the labels worked, the client described a much wider ambition: a paperless system covering crates, quality sheets, purchase orders, delivery dockets, crate hire and Certificates of Conformance. We produced three UI mockups — a week view, a delivery docket and crate traceability — and a phased proposal for a crate-keyed traceability system on PostgreSQL with a Xero integration.

That larger system is a proposal only. None of it has been built. What was delivered and accepted in this engagement is the label generator.

Outcome

The client's verdict on the final workbook: "Thank you - This one works perfectly now." and, of the label design, "Fantastic – We love it". The milestone was released.