Tech Forum

What are some best practices to track who has given talks?

wrigjef wrote:What are some best practices to track who has given talks?

The attached simple spreadsheet application is all I use. Shows speakers by date and also how long it has been since they spoke (calculated formula used).

The method working its way through Vegas wards is a google spreadsheet that all the bishopric members of that ward can see concurrently.
There is a count query that updates in real time the last time the adults and the youth have spoken.
We track the prayers and the conducting rotation on the same sheet --we haven't needed the query mechanism for prayers.

We would never go back to non-cloud solutions, it's so important for us to all be seeing it in meetings and then during the week for the bishopric member who is making the assignments to have a single list that is always up to date (i.e. that we never have to synchronize).

Here's a version of the spreadsheet for reference if you want to see the query mechanism:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

Sorry, that link lets you see but not duplicate now. Here is a version that currently saves a copy:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... Lgz5Y/copy

Are there instructions on importing and updating ward members? Thanks...it looks like a great program...

The theory of this would be that it would live in google docs so that everyone in the bishopric could see it in real time. So if you try exporting it to Excel, I don't know if the SQL expressions will work. If you prefer Excel, you might be able to convert it to a vllookup?

In google sheets the ranges are under Data>Named Ranges... From there, just click "+ Add a range" after you have created the 2018 tab. Someone may upload their updated if they have time.

You can do an initial population of the table by exporting a csv file from MLS or LCR and taking the names from there. When I did it, I wanted last name first so I could sort lists and find people more easily. I just used a concatenate function to generate a whole ward's worth of names in last comma first order. The query is supposed to handle last first or first first, though if you sort differently.

Because I took out people that we never were going to ask to speak, I didn't just reimport the list each time I updated because that would restore them to the list. Every once and a while, I or the execsec would just look at the move-in move-out report and the youth birthday reports (i.e. action and interview list) and add members to the appropriate table.

I'm remembering that MLS let me export birthdays easier than LCR but that may have changed and you may not care about the age of the youth on this sheet. (Our bishop at the time wanted the older youth speaking more frequently so that was useful for his tracking.)

Adding new years was a problem so I've received periodic requests to update the spreadsheet so it doesn't break every year. Here is a new version where the tabs aren't labeled 2020, 2021, etc, just current year, last year.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... Lgz5Y/copy

Please note Meetinghouse Technology Policy document (which you may or may not be able to access depend on your calling) prohibits using membership data in third-party applications or storing it in a cloud-based service. As it stands now, that policy would likely prohibit pulling any data from lds.org for such an application.

Dean is referring to this document, I believe: https://www.lds.org/help/support/meetin ... y?lang=eng

4.9.4 The use of cloud-based services for storing and/or backing up MLS or any membership related data is prohibited.

A partial list of members and certain birthdays may be "membership related data" subject to the policy even if it is not obtained in a meetinghouse depending on how you see it.