Microsoft announced this week a new product offering in beta, Microsoft Tag. Microsoft tag uses high capacity color barcodes allowing for more information then traditional 2D barcdoes in a smaller footprint (.625” vs 1.25”). Microsoft Tag includes a web site where you can create, manage and track your tags, and a mobile phone application that allows you to scan the tags using the camera built into your phone.

Seeing as I already have a box of several thousand business cards (and give away about 10 each year), asking my company to reprint a new batch of cards, with support for the 4 colors required by the barcode (there are reports that you can use grayscale and other monotone color schemes, but these are unsupported) is not an option. So instead, I am going to use a color printer and some mailing lables to retrofit my existing business cards.

1. Sign up for a Microsoft Tag account. It’s free, and all you need is a windows live ID
2. Create your tag. I created a tag of type URL
3. Render your tag. I tried the WMF, but kept getting a black background. So instead I exported to PDF, and then took a screen shot using the built-in capture tool in Foxit PDF Reader
4. Paste image into Paint.Net as a new image
5. Create a new layer to add additional text and save
6. With your new layer selected, press ctrl+M to merge the layers into a single image, then select all and copy
7. Paste the full size image into MS Word
8. Right click the image and resize to fit your label, in my case 2.6” x 1”
9. Re-copy the smaller image, then go to labels under the Mailings ribbon option
10. click the labels tab, then click options to select your label type
11. Paste your image into the Address field. It won’t show up, but if you click and drag like you are selecting text, you should see it highlighted at least. I don’t know if it’s a bug, or if pasting an image isn’t 100% supported.
12. Click Print. I printed to my black and white printer a couple of times to make sure everything looked OK and lined up on the labels before switching to the color printer and the label stock
13. If you need to re-adjust the image, just re-paste into word, and re-copy. It should update the image in the label screen without having to re-paste.