Auto-Generate Stake Directories

It would be great to create a utility that would take the existing stake membership list, existing stake calendar, and generate a Stake Directory in DOC, PDF, RTF and/or other formats. This is the time of year when a lot of stakes expend countless hours formatting member data and pulling together the calendars to produce stake directories. It's a time consuming task and one that could be solved one time for everyone IMHO. Most of the directories I've seen over the years (in California, Colorado and Wisconsin - I don't remember seeing them in Utah as much) are nearly identical, with few variations. It would be great to have a standard format and be able to generate it at the push of a button.

It might also be nice to use Church publishing to print these, rather than paying local publishers... assuming that the Church publishing would be less expensive. In locations outside of Salt Lake this is a burdensome task for a few members in the Stake every year - so it would be nice to solve it one time for everyone.

Related projects could include:
1. ward phone lists
2. Relief Society lists
a. phone lists
b. mailing labels

Perhaps the list generator could be coded in DHTML so that a leader could move the various data elements around to get the precise formatting they wanted?

Directories that go out of date almost before they're printed.

For the most part, we stopped doing ours. We refer them to the unit webpage (LUWS)

Agreed. However, there are some areas where internet access is not yet ubiquitous and the members prefer to have a hardcopy directory. Those Stakes continue to produce the hardcopy directories.

Wards and Relief Societies will likely always produce phonelists and mailing lists - until internet access comes standard with a new car. So the ability to auto-generate a phonelist would continue to be useful for many years to come.

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To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.

Also not all areas of the world have LUWS. We've just completed our stake calendar and directory for 2009. Yes a small percentage will be out-of-date the moment it is published but it is a very useful/requested document that we produce.

Old thread, but for anyone who may stumble across it in the future...

While not specifically designed for stake directories, I wrote a program for ward/branches that may be of interest to you. The project is called LDS Compact Directory and can be found here:http://ldscompactdir.sourceforge.net

This program can read either MLS or LUWS exported data and churn out a PDF file with very minimal effort. It will attempt to put everything on 1 page front and back. If that would shrink the text too much it forces additional pages. Just check some boxes and mash a button and your on your way.

Screenshot of some sample output:


Check out the page above for more info.

mongi3 wrote:Old thread, but for anyone who may stumble across it in the future...

While not specifically designed for stake directories, I wrote a program for ward/branches that may be of interest to you. The project is called LDS Compact Directory and can be found here:http://ldscompactdir.sourceforge.net

This program can read either MLS or LUWS exported data and churn out a PDF file with very minimal effort. It will attempt to put everything on 1 page front and back. If that would shrink the text too much it forces additional pages. Just check some boxes and mash a button and your on your way.
Check out the page above for more info.

I bolded the line in the quote because it is true. What a slick easy tool. This should just be a feature built right into MLS. It even works with the new format of the MLS 3.1 export files.
Thanks for creating this tool, it's great.:)

I am brand new to this forum.

This past year I decided to fill the void in our area to provide the 2010 La Verne Stake Directory. The past two printers had gone out of business and we will be providing Stake Directories to our members for at least the next 5 years.

I am semi-retired but very experienced in the electronic Pre-Press industry so I had the experience and the contacts to print the directory.

What surprised me was the amount of man-hours that was spent providing the data needed.

After my bid to the Stake was accepted I decided to contact other Stakes in my area to see how many of them had the same problem of finding a printer at a reasonable cost. I ended up doing 6 Stake Directories in my area. Working as a print broker I did make money on these directories both as a broker and in the Pre-Press area that is my area of expertise.

What surprised me was the amount of man-hours that each Stake spent providing me with the data files. The lowest was 20 hours by a very experienced software person. The most was 70 hours.

My background is software design going back for 42 years. As I talked to each member I decided that what they needed was a software program that could generate the data in a format that a printer understood.

My goal is to develop a C# program that will reduce the time spent to less than three hours.

My program will be developed in three stages. Stage 1 will reformat a CSV data file into a CSV data file with telephone, last name husband & wife, address, and a two digit zip code. Stage 2 will make the program interactive where the user can control, correct, and format the data into actual pages. Stage 3 will attack the calendar problem.

Those of you who are interested can contact me at stan_ruggio@yahoo.com.

ruggio wrote:. . . and a two digit zip code.

Would it be difficult to make it the last three digits of the zip code, or does that mess up the formatting? Two digits are not unique in most of our wards.

rhusted wrote:It would be great to create a utility that would take the existing stake membership list, existing stake calendar, and generate a Stake Directory in DOC, PDF, RTF and/or other formats. This is the time of year when a lot of stakes expend countless hours formatting member data and pulling together the calendars to produce stake directories. It's a time consuming task and one that could be solved one time for everyone IMHO. Most of the directories I've seen over the years (in California, Colorado and Wisconsin - I don't remember seeing them in Utah as much) are nearly identical, with few variations. It would be great to have a standard format and be able to generate it at the push of a button.

It might also be nice to use Church publishing to print these, rather than paying local publishers... assuming that the Church publishing would be less expensive. In locations outside of Salt Lake this is a burdensome task for a few members in the Stake every year - so it would be nice to solve it one time for everyone.

Related projects could include:
1. ward phone lists
2. Relief Society lists
a. phone lists
b. mailing labels

Perhaps the list generator could be coded in DHTML so that a leader could move the various data elements around to get the precise formatting they wanted?

holaaa amigos de la iglesia soy nuevo en este foro y me gustaria saber un poco mas sobre como se puede algunas cosa del sistema de la iglesia espero poder terner mas conocimiento sobre dicho sistema o compartir conocimiento dentro de lo establecido claro

f79 wrote:holaaa amigos de la iglesia soy nuevo en este foro y me gustaria saber un poco mas sobre como se puede algunas cosa del sistema de la iglesia espero poder terner mas conocimiento sobre dicho sistema o compartir conocimiento dentro de lo establecido claro

This is all I got from Google Translate:

holaaa church friends I'm new to this forum and I would like to know a little more about how can some thing the church system Terner hope to more knowledge about the system or share the knowledge within clearly established

mkmurray wrote:This is all I got from Google Translate:

Fixing the obvious typos and adding reasonable punctuation, I get:

hello church friends. I'm new to this forum and I would like to know a little more about how can some thing the church system. I hope to have more knowledge about the system or share the knowledge within clearly established

But the last sentence still seems incomplete, and unrelated to the topic of the thread.

ruggio wrote:I am brand new to this forum.

This past year I decided to fill the void in our area to provide the 2010 La Verne Stake Directory. The past two printers had gone out of business and we will be providing Stake Directories to our members for at least the next 5 years.

I am semi-retired but very experienced in the electronic Pre-Press industry so I had the experience and the contacts to print the directory.

What surprised me was the amount of man-hours that was spent providing the data needed.

After my bid to the Stake was accepted I decided to contact other Stakes in my area to see how many of them had the same problem of finding a printer at a reasonable cost. I ended up doing 6 Stake Directories in my area. Working as a print broker I did make money on these directories both as a broker and in the Pre-Press area that is my area of expertise.

What surprised me was the amount of man-hours that each Stake spent providing me with the data files. The lowest was 20 hours by a very experienced software person. The most was 70 hours.

My background is software design going back for 42 years. As I talked to each member I decided that what they needed was a software program that could generate the data in a format that a printer understood.

My goal is to develop a C# program that will reduce the time spent to less than three hours.

My program will be developed in three stages. Stage 1 will reformat a CSV data file into a CSV data file with telephone, last name husband & wife, address, and a two digit zip code. Stage 2 will make the program interactive where the user can control, correct, and format the data into actual pages. Stage 3 will attack the calendar problem.

Those of you who are interested can contact me at stan_ruggio@yahoo.com.

Just one thought, although what you are suggesting sounds interesting, you may want to wait for the next version of the LUWS (local unit web site) to come out. It will include new software for both a calendar and directory and may have an influence on what direction you go.

You can review what's been done so far by going to http://beta.lds.org and signing in with your LDS account (top right corner of the page).

Hi,

I've been doing the directory in my stake for the past few years.

I have a template for InDesign that works quite well.

I also use a combination of Mailer's Software and FileMaker to generate the membership directory portion. The biggest challenge it to fix all the addresses that other clerks don't bother to format properly. I am always amazed how many people don't really know their address.

If anyone is interested I would be more than willing to share what I have.

Regards,

mongi3 wrote:Old thread, but for anyone who may stumble across it in the future...

While not specifically designed for stake directories, I wrote a program for ward/branches that may be of interest to you. The project is called LDS Compact Directory and can be found here:http://ldscompactdir.sourceforge.net

This program can read either MLS or LUWS exported data and churn out a PDF file with very minimal effort. It will attempt to put everything on 1 page front and back. If that would shrink the text too much it forces additional pages. Just check some boxes and mash a button and your on your way.

Screenshot of some sample output:


Check out the page above for more info.

I assume that one page really means one sheet (2 pages):o

At least for ward directories, this functionality is included in the new beta directory at beta.lds.org/directory/. There is a print button in the upper right hand corner that does this and gives quite a bit of control over what data to include.

I'm assuming this functionality will be available for the entire stake membership as well in the near future but a new version of the beta directory was uploaded last evening that no longer references the entire stake directory as "coming soon".

lajackson,

I am sorry that I did not reply sooner I did not pick the option to be emailed on replies.

It will be easy to modify the program to output any number of digits for the zip code.

All I need to do is to separate my city/zip option into a city option for one field and make the zip another option for another field. The software currently allows the user to determine how many characters to display for each field. If I restrict the city to one character and the zip to 2 characters I get my stake’s current format. If you increase your zip to 3 characters you would get what you are looking for.

It is ideas like yours that I am looking for to make the software more useable.

Stan