Getting Started with BarTender

Welcome to BarTender!

Organizations around the world, from small business to the world's largest companies, trust BarTender to help them meet evolving industry regulations and practices, with its ease of deployment and secure, configurable technology. We couldn't be happier to have you joining this group.

This series of resources and videos will walk you through the most common tasks for new BarTender users.

Installing BarTender

If you haven't already done so, you should download the latest release for your version of BarTender from our portal. The download can take several minutes, depending on your internet connection.

  • The following support article will assist you to install and activate your BarTender license:
    Installing and activating BarTender 2021

  • If you're an existing customer of BarTender looking to update to the latest version, we recommend you visit this page instead

    • Installing Drivers by Seagull™

    Seagull Scientific makes drivers for thousands of printer models. When used with BarTender, they allow you to take advantage of special high-speed printing functions that are built right into your thermal printer.

    Although this step is optional, we highly recommend using our printer drivers whenever possible. BarTender will work with any standard Windows driver, but you won't have access to enhanced performance options. For more information on why Drivers by Seagull™ matter, visit our Technical Document.

    This video will show you how to download and install the drivers. You can download Drivers by Seagull™ here.

    Getting around BarTender

    BarTender has a familiar and intuitive user interface for designing simple and complex templates for printing labels, cards and more. The following collection of support articles and videos will show how easy it is to design your first templates using BarTender:


  • Setting up your BarTender document for a thermal printer (video)
  • Setting up your BarTender document for a laser / inkjet printer (video)
  • Adding text to your template
  • Adding barcodes to your template
  • Adding images to your template
  • Setting up text wrapping

    • Creating data entry forms

    Requires Professional, Automation, or Enterprise Edition of BarTender.

    Now you know how to create static labels where data never changes, but, in the real world, data changes all the time. There are a number of ways to create these "dynamic" templates in BarTender.

    The first option we'll cover is BarTender's data-entry forms. These forms can be used to input data right at print time. In this video you will learn about the different elements available for data entry form design, and how to use them.

    Connecting to a database

    Another popular method to print variable data is to connect your BarTender document to a database. At print-time, BarTender will automatically pull the information out of your database and print one, or more, items for each selected record in the database.

    BarTender can connect to almost any database and data file type in the world including; Microsoft Excel, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Azure, Oracle, MySQL, and more!

    In this video you will learn how to connect BarTender to an Excel document, link database fields to objects on the template, and select specific database records to print.

    In this video

    What's next?

    We've only scratched the surface of what BarTender can do. You can continue your journey with BarTender by looking at advanced template design concepts, integrating BarTender with other applications, or browsing the community to converse with other BarTender users.

    Here are some specific topics that you may find interesting: