Using a barcode with Excel

Hello there,
I work in a Marine science lab. We have thousands of samples inputed into an excel spreadsheet. We are looking to somehow use a barcode scanner to scan a barcode on the outside of a bucket containing 30+ samples, and time stamp that those samples in that bucket were checked at that date.

If you could please help me figure out how to set this up, what I must buy, etc, it would be much appreciated!

Cheers!

A keyboard wedge bar-code reader acts just like a keyboard and would be a good choice.

Once the bar-code has been entered into the selected cell, an event drive macro could then look up the appropriate rows and insert the current date time using the Now() function.

If you have one of those scanner guns you just plug it into the computer and you can scan the barcode number to a cell in excel.
then you can have a simple macro to record the time that it was scanned and any other similar information you need.

As far as I can tell it is pretty straightforward we don't need to install anything on our computers before using our guns as far as i know.