Digital Sign Church Membership Made Easy

Digital sign church membership

welcome to church membership on lines tutorial how to use data export to create a custom directory using the data export feature in your church membership online program to begin with in order to access the data export program you will need a admin or pastor access level to church membership online the data export feature is located in admin section which requires an admin or passer access level you'll also need to have resident on your computer a Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel program both those programs will be used to take the exported file and to use it as a mail merged file for a Microsoft Word document now let's go ahead and go into your church membership online program when you come into your church membership online program you'll want to go to the admin section and go to data export once there you'll notice that there are several types of data that can be exported for our purposes we're going to look at either the individuals or households files because those records contain the address information that is used for a church directory for our purposes we're going to go ahead and choose to create an individual directory using individual data we won't need to change the export type because excel file works fine and we don't need to compress the file as well so go ahead and click export when you click export in awhile you'll see a window that pops up that says that requesting where you would like to save that dad usually we encourage churches to save it to their desktop because that's the easiest place to locate that file once you do that then you're ready to go into your Excel program but what you can do is just go ahead and click the file that you create on your desktop it will open and you'll see this file that has several field names some of which will be easily easy to recognize like the first name last name street and city which will be using that data for our our church our specific individual directory and you scroll over you'll see that there's other data too that could be used if you wanted to for your own unique directory once you have that file you can go ahead and open up your Word document when you open up a Word document well it'll open up to an eight-and-a-half by 11 document but what we want you to do is go to the mailings tab located at the top of that document and select it when you select it we would like you to go to the start mail merge this feature allows you by clicking the arrow there to merge your data in your excel file was several templated based types of communications like letters emails and lopes labels which we have a tutorial on that we just created and and directory which is what we're going to use now when you click directory not much changes on your page as opposed to clicking a mailing the mailing feature which allows you to see all the various Melling labels but don't let that bother you at this point the next thing we want to do before we go much further is go ahead and select the data exported file that we'll be using to merge with this document so go ahead and click select recipients we're going to use the existing list that we that we put upon the desktop and it'll open up a window look where we can navigate to where that list is it's gonna be on our desktop and there's the list right there and it shows that it's in the individuals is the worksheet that time that was in that file only to say okay now that we have the selected recipients if we wanted to before you even go further we can actually edit the recipient list from this great utility that they have we can choose to uncheck those names perhaps that don't have complete addresses which we would probably end up deleting anyway from the list and we keep going down this list and make selections there want to and it's a it's a great utility and I encourage you to consider that as a as one of the ways in which you can clean up your your directory list before it gets printed now what we can do is go ahead and start creating that list and what we want to do is is start with them now merged filled so the first thing we're going to do it's pulling in these field names from the merged data export that we did from our program we're going to start with the last name we want to create kind of a unique directory individual directory and I put in a comma and a space and then we're going to put in our first name then we're going to do a carriage return down now the next thing we'll want to do is put in the street address we will do another return then we're gonna do a the city do a comma and a space then the state a little bit further down there's another space put in the zip code and then a carriage return and then we're going to put in a home phone number and so we're gonna type that in because we want that to be there for all all the various addresses there I'm gonna choose phone from the selection then we're gonna carry down one more and then put in a cell phone number and space and then we're gonna put in the mobile phone number there then we're gonna do two more carriage returns and now before we go to do anything else let's preview what the names and the information will look like in those fields now remember not all names will have the the information for those particular fields like here's a home phone number but there's no cell phone or does don't let that bother you because more than likely you'll see that in another field later on another address now before we go much further we want to we want to bring some customization to this and so we're gonna go back to the page layout and we want to do a three column newsletter so I'm going to go ahead and put in three columns and we'll see those columns that are there now they're kind of narrow so we're gonna change our margins now go to margins and change to a narrow margin now we have a lot more space and then we're going to go ahead and change the spacing in it because that's kind of a wide spacing there so let's go to no space that's starting to look better and let's give a bolder and a larger type to this to the last and first name and that kind of looks good right there now we can add a lot more in a customization to this colors or there's a lot of other types of fields that you could put in you could put in the member type there's a lot of things you do there but for now let's go ahead and go back to the mailings now and see what this looks like since we've populated this first field we don't have to go to the next name all we have to do this go to finish and merge and then we're gonna choose the Edit individual document so put up an individual Microsoft document that's separate from the one that you just would have been working on you can think of the other one as a template and what we'll do is we'll populate the using air the whole eight-and-a-half by 11 sheet and additional pages depending on how many names are in your and your database in us we have 30 pages here so there's quite a few names here so we've got this document and this kind of stands alone from the template you just created if you wanted to you could actually make adjustments here say if we wanted to carry this over to the next line over we can do that on the same thing here just carry it over and then carry this one over and so now we have a page here of all names and addresses and to make up a church directory and encourage you to experiment with it there's a lot of things you can do with it including them putting in artwork and other things like church logos and stuff to create your field and so I hope you have a lot of fun with it I know it will help you in your ministry as you seek to try to create unique documents for your specific ministry that you that you have and again if you have any questions feel free to contact us at support at church office online comm thank you