Sacrament meeting roll

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mprusse
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Location: Littleton, CO-USA

Sacrament meeting roll

#1

Post by mprusse »

As a member of a bishopric I would like to have an attendance roll I could use silently from the stand to make note of who is in sacrament meeting each week. Is it possible to create a roll list of adult members (not simply head of house like Barton, Tom & Sally but rather Barton, Tom; Barton, Sally; etc. so it could be recorded for each adult member? Again, I would like it to be in roll format showing the dates such as the other rolls that are printed for classes. Also, it would be helpful to be able to not include on the list those that are totally inactive.

Thanks for any help on how to do this.
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aebrown
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Location: Draper, Utah

#2

Post by aebrown »

macsense wrote:As a member of a bishopric I would like to have an attendance roll I could use silently from the stand to make note of who is in sacrament meeting each week. Is it possible to create a roll list of adult members (not simply head of house like Barton, Tom & Sally but rather Barton, Tom; Barton, Sally; etc. so it could be recorded for each adult member? Again, I would like it to be in roll format showing the dates such as the other rolls that are printed for classes. Also, it would be helpful to be able to not include on the list those that are totally inactive.

You can create a Sunday School class for this purpose (called "Sacrament Roll", perhaps). The only rule would simply be minimum age of 18. You would take care not to remove any of the members from their real SS class. Then, as with any class, you can manually remove members from the class if you don't want inactives included. Once you have the class created, you can print a roll. Because of the rule settings, as new adults move into the ward, they would automatically be added to the class.
mattprasmussen
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Location: Amsterdam, NY

#3

Post by mattprasmussen »

I’ve found the easiest thing for me is making a list from the csv export. The attendance sheet is for the quarter. I used to sort by age to get just the adults but then started asking "how long since this YM or YW was here?" and such so now I just include everyone, including primary kids. Our clerk also uses it to verify his count. Excluding less active members would be difficult unless you used a custom field to identify them and sort them out.

Here are the steps I use. (I wrote them down on the second quarter I did to make sure they look consistent.)

1. Export membership to csv file and open the csv file in Excel
2. Copy and paste full name to a new sheet
3. Put the dates for the quarter across the top row by putting the first date in cell B1 and using a formula of B1 + 7 to copy dates across
4. Autoformat the sheet with the “List 1” preference
5. Format the date cells with a custom category and type = d mmm
6. Format the date cells with 90 degrees orientation
7. Set the date column width to 3.5
8. Select all and add grid lines
9. Select all and change font to Times New Roman 8 pt
10. change heading font to 10 pt
11. Resize the name column to fit new font size
12. Set margins to 1 inch for left and right, .25 for top and bottom, .1 for footer
13. Check center on page horizontally
14. Add a footer of “Page 1 of n”, then insert the year and quarter before the page numbers
15. Format the footer text to Times New Roman 8 pt
16. Repeat row 1 for all pages
17. Print double sided
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mkmurray
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#4

Post by mkmurray »

Wow how nice it would be to know everyone in your ward that well to be able to take attendance at Sacrament meeting. Our ward is way too transient to be able to do this. We can barely keep up. We're in Utah and don't have any idea who lives in about 50 of our townhomes.

It keeps me busy enough as Membership Clerk for sure.
jbh001
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#5

Post by jbh001 »

mkmurray wrote:Wow how nice it would be to know everyone in your ward that well to be able to take attendance at Sacrament meeting. Our ward is way too transient to be able to do this. We can barely keep up. We're in Utah and don't have any idea who lives in about 50 of our townhomes.
I am terrible at putting faces and names together. One thing that helped was that in one ward I was in, they had gotten into the habit of passing around a blank sheet of paper for the attendance rolls in SS, RS, EQ, & HP. The secretaries then transferred that information onto the regular rolls. I think the rational was that they wanted to avoid passing around the regular attendance rolls to prevent someone from using it as fodder for rumors and gossip ("wow sister Smith hasn't been to church for seven weeks").

When I was called as an EQ president, another benefit from this became very clear in that after the roll was passed around, I could look at it during class and associate names with faces by comparing the order of the names on the roll with whom was sitting next to whom.

When I moved to a different ward, the bishop regularly exported the ward directory to his Palm Pilot (or equivalent PDA) and somehow marked who was in attendance in sacrament meeting each week (while the speakers were speaking). I was eventually called as a counselor to him. Since I didn't have a Palm Pilot (or any PDA for that matter), I just took a blank sheet of paper and started writing down everyone I knew. It took me a few months to get up to speed, but in the end it was very helpful because if I didn't recognize someone, it gave me a good excuse/opportunity to go introduce myself to them.

When I moved into a new ward, I kept that same process for doing the sacrament meeting count as ward clerk to help me get to know the members of my new ward.
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sneeland-p40
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Sacrament meeting roll

#6

Post by sneeland-p40 »

We print one of these every Sunday. When the Clerk comes in before the morning meetings, the first thing done is a Send\Recieve. When that is done he exports the Membership records to a .csv file. Then he opens the .csv export file as a new spreadsheet. A macro is run to strip out all the unwanted columns so only the Preferred Name column is left. That is written to a .txt format file.

Then the new .txt file is open as a word processing document. Another macro is run to reformat it to look better.

It's a few steps for the Clerk that I'm sure if I spent some time I could come up with something easier, but it's not really that difficult to do.

If any questions, email me off-site.

sneeland@comcast.net
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Steve Neeland
Mount Juliet, TN
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mkmurray
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#7

Post by mkmurray »

jbh001 wrote:When I moved into a new ward, I kept that same process of during the sacrament meeting count as ward clerk to help me get to know the members of my new ward.
No, it's all a great idea. I actually did the EQ attendance myself when I was secretary. I got to where I knew just about every face in the quorum (at least of the ones that showed up even somewhat regularly).

Although we have 2 EQs and I'm now the Membership Clerk. It seems as though there is a totally different crowd of faces during Sacrament meeting. But that's not it either, it changes every week (seriously). Because of new construction, we have probably 40 new faces a month. We also have like 5-6 moveouts a month. I'm not kidding when I saw the ward is highly transient. I'm not kidding when we say we have no idea who lives in 50 of the townhomes in our boundry.
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opee
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#8

Post by opee »

sneeland wrote:It's a few steps for the Clerk that I'm sure if I spent some time I could come up with something easier, but it's not really that difficult to do.

If any questions, email me off-site.

sneeland@comcast.net


I had an Excel Spreadsheet that showed green for attending and red for not attending sacrament meeting. It was a great way to (1) get to know members in the ward as Clerk, and (2) see the patterns of families and realize needs ahead of time.

I always thought a program that ran on a PDA would be nice to easily check off attendance and allow it to do the reporting for me. Just have never had the time and complete know-how to accomplish it...
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