Hi Fred,
My original hope was that I would remain in full control of the main file
here at home. The copy at the post would be just for informational purposes.
We'd export out the Legion & Sons Rosters into an Excel spreadsheet for them
to do the updates on and send back to me with the information highlighted so
we know what data was changed. That is supposed to be what's happening
now...it's not working.
The person doing the Sons membership is doing a pretty good job of keeping
us updated. He highlights whatever he changes or adds in the current Excel
file. He also does this work on the post computer. So my husband just goes
down there with his USB key to bring home the changed file and then I put the
updates into my file and he brings it back down there.
The person doing the Legion membership does his work at home. (Which I
can't say anything about as it's up to the group to decide what they will
allow and it's up to the person who does the membership to do what he or she
is comfortable with. I do all my work at home. It's too hard for me to get
to the post to do the work there and it would be physically uncomfortable for
me.) He uses Works which isn't too big of a deal as you can open it with
Excel. But updates aren't being done properly and given to us. This is the
problem when the person who does membership is a post officer and those roles
usually change yearly. Although the current person doing the membership, is
planning on running for another year in this position.
Your solution sounds like it's working very well. I just see us continuing
to have issues. My husband has been talking about trying to split the Legion
membership off of the senior vice position at least for a year or two to get
it all straightened out. I think it's a good idea if they had someone do the
job for at least 2 years at a time instead of 1. Your first year is really
figuring things out. I've been doing the Auxiliary membership for 6 years
now and Secretary/Treasurer for 5 and I've been doing the mailing list for
about 4 or 5 years now.
5%. For mailings, I use stored procedures/ queries to create a mini
database (takes only seconds, could also be a spreadsheet) which I email to
to the person who is doing the mailing, and they print the labels.
That's something that I will keep in mind if they decide they really want
print the labels at the post. I still don't know why they were thinking
about doing it. They don't really have very good equipment down there.
Whereas here, we bought a very expensive color laser all in one machine
that's like a small business machine and we just upgraded our computers as
well.
It seems like Access will make the printing of the labels a little easier.
In the Excel file, once we started putting in the Zip+4's (we still have some
regular zips)....I had changed the field format and when I went to merge that
into Word for printing. The begining 0's weren't there. I was so ticked
off. I tried changing the field back and it screwed things up. I didn't
want to spend the time to sit down, create a new field, format it properly
and then type in all the zipcodes again. The solution I found was to install
the Avery Wizard but I still couldn't use it right from Word. I had to use
it from inside Excel. It did work though
I do have a question on the mailing list. Our post office requires us to
sort by zip. It requires the use of 2 boxes. One for all the 030's and one
for the rest. The people who do the labeling were having trouble keeping
things straight as they would just hand out a couple sheets of labels to each
person. So they asked us to split the file into two and print two groups of
labels. Is this something that could be done easily enough in Access?
Most other political issues can be solved by sending people copies /
mini-databases of whatever they need to have. But you have to hang tough
that yours is the "master" and ALL updates must go only to it.
I do like that thought as well. But if that use that to make the updates,
how I can tell what's been changed/added without having to go line by line?
We've had to do that so many times over the years it gets frustrating.
Lisa
