Tech Forum

Greetings!

I have been assigned by my Bishop to put information on a single sheet for families in our ward that can be used in our efforts to contact, in person, families in our ward for reactivation and missionary work. All the information I need is in the custom report format section. However It only displays the information in a columnar format. I want to be able to pull the information from the Directory of Members Report, in the same or similar format, and put it into a report. In another section of the report, I need to put Home Teachers and Visiting Teachers assigned to the family. Along with other information that would be helpful to have on hand as we are visiting these families with all this information on a single sheet in a neat and organized fashion. Is there a report or custom report that already has this information on it without going to the crammed columnar format? How are the report formats saved? Where are they saved? Can they be imported, edited and saved under a different report name?

Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Take a look at the Households report in MLS.

The data in MLS reports, custom or built-in, can be copied using the Windows shortcut control keys Ctrl+Shift+C after clicking anywhere within the displayed data. That data can then be pasted in another program such as a spreadsheet for manipulation.

And a columnar custom report, once defined, can also be saved as a CSV by clicking a button without using the generalized keyboard shortcut jdlessley described.

His advice about exporting to third-party software is certainly correct. If you can't get the final report format you need from MLS, then you can export columnar data file and format your final report using whatever capabilities that software has. In addition to a spreadsheet, you might also define your final report using a mail-merge function in a word-processor, or the report-definition functionality in Microsoft Access, etc. The learning curve on a mail-merge is probably easier to master.

Without resorting to custom reports, I think the canned Households report in MLS (or is it Household?) has the content you need. But if memory serves, that format is not one family per page. It is tightly formatted for printing. But if it does not meet your needs, then exporting to a third-party application is probably your best solution.