Raffle tickets have become a mainstay of our events, making it easy to handle the large volume of items donated by our sponsors. Back in SQLSaturday #1 they looked more like business cards due to time constraints, but as we've learned and had time to reflect we've been upgrading here and there, so recently I spent some time making up some 'real' raffle tickets - see the sample below.

I used a template I found at www.nashua.com to get me started in Word, then marked it up extensively. They print 8 to a sheet on blank raffle tickets available from OfficeMax ($20 for 50 sheets), but we bought 1000 sheets from www.perforatedpaper.com for $80 plus shipping. The latter has coarser perfing, doesn't work well in a laser but hoping my local printer dude can make it work. If you look at the bottom of the image you can see the barcode - Code 39 - using a font from Morovia that was $99 (I tried the free ones, but they didn't seem to scan well for me). The barcode itself is first four characters of last name plus their registration id. That's there to make it easy for sponsors, they can bring us the stack and we'll just scan the list, then look it up against our data instead of them having to key/scan in all the data.

An interesting project. Word actually does a pretty good job of mail merge, and I found it easier to achieve the results I wanted with it over Access (neither Access or Reporting Services does well at showing you column views - you have to export it to see them). As for the design, making things look good isn't my forte, I just make it work!