Jill,

The keyboard wedge works fine but can be a little tricky. That is, if a person touches a key while the program is waiting for wedge input it can spoil the bar code read so you'll have to watch out for that. Some drivers have the option to add a CR (chr(13)) at the end which can be handy for terminating the read. Or, you can keep testing the input for the terminating frame character. One nice thing about keyboard wedges, you can build your whole program without having to have the reader attached to your computer. Choose a couple of printable characters to represent the start and end of the frame, then substitute the real framing characters later. You can then test your error traps, etc., very easily. For example, "@123456$" could represent the framed bar code "123456."

Allen