The biggest problem with the excel download is that there is no way to have the entire family together. We have to manually put each child with the same parents. It seems really strange, especially as it is in the database that way. Grrr. It also makes it more likely to have some human error.
PTO Manager downloads each student in a separate line with their parent contact infor. It would be great if there was a choice to download the volunteer and then have fields for "student1" "student1 class", "student2", "student2 class", etc.
After getting the excel spreadsheet set up with the data, we use a mail merge that puts it in the word format/table that we use to print.
We're working on a template but to take a lot of the manual work out after you export to Excel is to import it to Access (or another database application). Once you have all the information in Access (and you can refresh the tables at any time), you can create your own report layout, which is the way you want to do your directory. Once we complete this I will inform Mike and he can see if there's a way to share this.
Right now the process is fairly manual once you get it into excel. The problem we have in creating a template is that every school seems to do their directory just a little different so that no template would really be effective on a large scale. The other issue is Manager is built to capture every parent as a unique volunteer where as many directories put moms+dads together.
With that said, I think you will find having Manager as a place to start from when creating your directory will be a huge help no matter what your directory looks like.
If any schools have created templates - I would love to hear from you!
The PTO Manager looks great...and the 2 hour power pledge sheet sounds good. The key I am looking at is the directory ability. I understand that the software really collects all of the info into a database, but does anyone have an easy way of dumping the contact info into a school directory format? or is it all manual once you export the data to excel?
