Tech Forum

Our ward wants to create a spread sheet of active members attending sac meetings. To which we will add less actives. We want to use mls and either create a list using mls (we would want to filter this for actives only) or export the list on the mls computer to an open office spreadsheet.
Has any one done this and can you help.
Stephen Sinclair,
butt Stake clerk,
Chester Stake.

stephen500 wrote:Our ward wants to create a spread sheet of active members attending sac meetings. To which we will add less actives. We want to use mls and either create a list using mls (we would want to filter this for actives only) or export the list on the mls computer to an open office spreadsheet.

It's easy enough to extract a list of all the members in MLS and export it to a spreadsheet. But MLS has no indicators of who is active or not. The term "active" doesn't even have a consistent definition in the Church, and even if it did, MLS does not store attendance records for an individual.

You could certainly create a Custom field in which you could specify for each member whether they are active or inactive, then you could write a custom report to report on that so that you could filter by that field. But my guess is that someone who knows the ward well (certainly the bishop, but probably the ward clerk or others) could go through the whole list of members in just a few minutes and indicate who is active or not, and that would be a much simpler approach. Of course the list would have to be refreshed periodically as members move in or out or change activity status, but you'd have to do that work to keep the custom field up to date anyway.

I created a new'Sunday School class in MLS, which I called 'Gospel Doctrine - Active' (using the 'Add Class' option. I then 'weeded out' all of the less-actives. I then print roll cards for this class as needed. We use them not only for the Gospel Doctrine class, but also for recording sacrament meeting attendance. As members return to activity, we just add them to the list manually (in manuscript), and periodically update the class members for this class on MLS.