A request for information
October 17th, 2006 by Bryce Inouye
Can any of you ward clerk types out there tell me what information I can get out of the church’s membership record management system, and in what format? What I’m after is something like first name, last name, street address, city, state, zip, either tab-delimited, .csv, or other simple text file format. Our ward clerk is great, but from a generation that doesn’t speak XML.
You can post in comments below (it might be nice to get a discussion on how people use the church’s tools), or you can email me directly at bryce at millennialstar dot org.
I’m no Ward Clerk, but you can pull a .csv of the ward list from the Church Website for your ward… I do it to generate the ward list onto my palm pilot.
I haven’t used the software for a while, but there was a feature to export such data in CSV format in the past.
The ward clerk can export to CSV only (no XML that I’m aware of.) By default, it comes with much more information that you need, so he probably ought to delete several columns, or you can export it yourself from within your ward’s web site.
Wow, I’m glad I read this post. I didn’t know one could download the membership directory in CSV format. Within approximately 15 minutes I was able to download the data and create a Google Earth overlay with all of the members’ homes plotted along with their names, addresses and telephone numbers. I’ve wanted to do that for a long time.
http://ldsoss.org/ has a few links to projects which do useful things to the information you can export out of MLS.
SFW,
I’d be interested in an explanation of how to do that. I’ve got the csv file downloaded. Where do I go from there?
“Google Earth overlay with all of the members’…” I live (West Jordan UT) in a ward which has a boundary not much bigger than a mile in circumference (my wife and I walk around it often) with about 80% ‘members’, so our Google Earth overlay wouldn’t do much good.
Daylan (#7) - I weep for you. May one day God bless you to overcome this adversity.
Getting an export into tab-delimited or .csv is easy. Getting it to include everything you want is problematic. Case in point: periodically I export a unit’s household directory onto a 3.5″ disk, in tab-delimited format. When I get home I have to add the ZIP Codes for my GIS software. I could go into “Custom Reports” and set up a report with the ZIPs, but I can’t export such a table.