Save reports from LDS.ORG to Word or text

Why, oh why, doesn't the website allow reports to be saved to a word file or to text? Clerks need to be able to download and manipulate data such as birthday lists. The website classically saves files to PDF, but the alternating line colors drive the Acrobat PDF OCR crazy and one is unable to save the file to Word even with Acrobat. Why make it so darned hard!?
Dale Webb
Galesburg (IL) Ward

They removed some exports from MLS for privacy reasons. So it may be hard for a reason.

That doesn't help the clerks that NEED to have the data in a format other than the one chosen for us. They could enable exports for clerks and bishop(ric)s and keep it closed for the general membership.
DW

Keep in mind the exports removed from MLS were only accessible to those with MLS admin rights - typically Bishops and the Ward Clerk.

It your situation really about need, or is it supporting long-standing practices? With LCR and LDS Tools, most people who really have a need for information have access to it themselves. It may not be in the nicest format ever, but it's there.

Using chrome (haven't tried other browsers), go to the birthday list and click the print button on the page. It will load in chrome as a pdf. In the address bar you will notice in the querystring something like ?pdf=true. Change that to pdf=false and reload the page. Now you will see a bunch of html code. Right click on the white html code page in Chrome and choose the save as option. Change the save as type option to "All Files" and change the File name to birthday-list-print.xls

Now double click on the file and you might get an error message that says something about format blah blah blah, but click ok and wa la - your data is in excel.

Oh you said word. Okay, well put the file name as birthday-list-print.doc