Stake or Ward Phone Directory Template

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opee
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Stake or Ward Phone Directory Template

#1

Post by opee »

Does anyone have an easy-to-use template for a Stake and/or Ward phone directory that they can share? I am looking to create a 2008 phone directory, but have heard that the previous ones have taken weeks to put together.

Any suggestions on making a simple, but useful Stake Phone directory out of MLS or from exported MLS data--that is in a smaller format than 8x11?
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WelchTC
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#2

Post by WelchTC »

If anyone does have a good template, I would encourage you to post the template here so others can use it.

Tom
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thedqs
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#3

Post by thedqs »

I had a program that took the old MIS data and formatted it into a nice RTF document with heading and everything. There was also a Stake Option where it would format it for printing in the stake directory which was 5.5x8.5. I'll have to see if I can find the source code for it though.
- David
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srweight
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Yes Please!

#4

Post by srweight »

thedqs wrote:I had a program that took the old MIS data and formatted it into a nice RTF document with heading and everything. There was also a Stake Option where it would format it for printing in the stake directory which was 5.5x8.5. I'll have to see if I can find the source code for it though.

It would be wonderful to have a directory template that will do the pagination for booklet and duplex printing in the 5.5 X 8.5 inch format.

Even better would be to have MLS print it out with a range of options to list wards and families in complete format and in phone directory format.

It really does take a few weeks at a couple of hours a day or it take a few days at 4 or 5 hours a day.
fraserredmond
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Template for smaller wards

#5

Post by fraserredmond »

Below is the process and a template I developed for our ward earlier this year. I wanted a way to automate it as much as possible from MLS - until I was called, someone typed all the information out by hand, and the layout took 2 pages, I've got it down to 1 page.

This is only going to be usable for wards with <80 active families, (or about 180 if using both sides.)

Also the template is in A4, so to use it on Letter sized paper you'll need to adjust the paper-size, margins and tab-stops (sorry if thats inconvenient, but you American's can put up with it for a change ;))
  1. Create new User-Defined Field called "Phonelist"
  2. Create 2 Custom Reports:
    1. Fields: HoH Name & Spouse, Phone, Address, City, Postcode. Criteria: Phonelist=y
    2. Fields: HoH Name & Spouse. Criteria: Phonelist Is Blank
  3. For each Head-of-House you want to be on the phonelist set that Field to "y". This allows you to filter out Less-Actives or people who don't want their details on the phonelist.
  4. You can use the second report each time to check for families to be added (as well as the move-ins report.)
  5. Once your list is correct open the first report, and copy (click on grid, Ctrl-Shift-C) and then paste into the template.
  6. Do any tidying up - updating the leadership details, adding families who've just moved in whose records haven't arrived, etc.
In our Ward/Stake/Country the ward and stake geocodes aren't used, so I photocopy a map of our town on the back of the phonelist and put the family's grid-reference into the ward geocode field, and put that in place of the postcode on the custom report. (For families our of town, I put North, West, etc)

I've just finished working on a webpage that converts membership.csv->Google Maps/Google Earth KML, so I can make the map from screenshots of Google Maps with each family 'pin-pointed'. I'll be putting this up in the MLS forum in the next few days.
Attachments
Phone List Template.doc
(85.5 KiB) Downloaded 832 times
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thedqs
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#6

Post by thedqs »

redzarf wrote:I've just finished working on a web-page that converts membership.csv->Google Maps/Google Earth KML, so I can make the map from screenshots of Google Maps with each family 'pin-pointed'. I'll be putting this up in the MLS forum in the next few days.

Please remember that Church policy currently prohibits the uploading of MLS information to any website not owned by the church. You can keep the information on your own personal computer and run programs from there on the data but you cannot upload it to a server, even if that server doesn't keep track of the information.

Someone has developed a script that does exactly what your proposed for client side use. You can see more about it at [thread=326]GoogleEarth and Membership Data[/thread]
- David
fraserredmond
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I've posted my Map-maker on the forum for review

#7

Post by fraserredmond »

thedqs wrote:Please remember that Church policy currently prohibits the uploading of MLS information to any website not owned by the church. You can keep the information on your own personal computer and run programs from there on the data but you cannot upload it to a server, even if that server doesn't keep track of the information.

Someone has developed a script that does exactly what your proposed for client side use. You can see more about it at [thread=326]GoogleEarth and Membership Data[/thread]

Thanks David. I had already put some explicit usage warnings in my version, including a link to the same thread you had linked to.

Unfortunately the script you linked to doesn't work here in NZ because Yahoo's Geocoder doesn't have street-data for here (but Google does.)

I've posted my version to the forum, you can see it here:
http://tech.lds.org/forum/showthread.php?p=6238

Let me know if you still have any concerns about it, or suggestions on improvements.
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thedqs
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#8

Post by thedqs »

Looks good to me, thanks for understanding and making a great tool.
- David
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jsweeny-p40
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#9

Post by jsweeny-p40 »

sorry for the double post, but here goes:

Okay, I'm sharing two files here: One Excel spreadsheet and one Publisher template.


Here is the Excel template:
sanitized directory.xls
(17.5 KiB) Downloaded 756 times

I started with the csv that you can get from your ward website via lds.org. The reason I used this instead of the exported data from MLS is beause it is one family per line instead of one individual per line.

So, start with the csv data and modify it a little to make it formatted like this example. The main changes you'll make are adding ampersands to wives, commas to children, and filenames for family pictures. The pictures will look best if the aspect ratio is 3x4 (I used the MS Office Picture Manager to do that).

Next, here is the Publisher template:
template.zip
(8.28 KiB) Downloaded 493 times
This uses Microsoft Publisher's Catalog Merge Wizard to push the Excel data and the pictures into a 'catalog'.

I cram a lot of stuff in there. My goal was to make it more compact. The year before I did it, the folks put six families per page -- I do fourteen. So there are some funny situations:

* I only allow folks to have two phone numbers OR kids. not both ;)
* if they have _lots_ of kids, I only allow one email address.
I tried to make examples for these in my example spreadsheet.

The final product looks somewhat like this (I blurred it to protect my fellow ward members):
(Attachment no longer available)

I add a few more pages with stuff like:
* ward leadership: names and phone numbers
* contact info for stake, family history center, institute
* temple info, hours, etc.
* addresses of missionaries from the ward


When you print it out, Publisher is smart enough to arrange the pages correctly to print 'a' families on the same page as 'z' since this forms a folded booklet style directory.

I am happy to answer any questions. I hope it is useful.


Jonny Sweeny
jsweeny@iu.edu
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opee
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any other templates

#10

Post by opee »

I know that a few new members have joined since this posting...

Any other ideas on Stake/Ward directory templates for easy creation of a Stake or Ward directory from MLS or LUWS?
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