User Support Forum

Hi folks,

I have spent about a week working on our directory. We are trying to use the usual "Detailed" directory that you can auto populate, but we needed a way to add in a line for our deacons to show up. Our Treasurer emailed support and they sent us to the support page to make a "Custom Report"

So far, I have been able to manipulate the custom report to almost perfectly emulate the "Detailed" directory option under reports. I say almost because I cannot figure out how to do 2 things.




1. (Top arrow) I am unable to figure out how to get the last name & first names to look like the "Detailed" directory report.
They normally look like: LASTNAME, His & Her
This report makes it: Last name First (usually one family or the other, with no comma)

AND

2. (Bottom arrow) I am unable to get the family picture to stretch into Detail section from Group Header 1 section like the "Detailed" directory report. With the way the report is set up, it leaves a large white space under the mailing address.

TL;DR - I would like to make this custom report to almost exactly look like the "Detailed" directory report, but with our added deacon line and the logo at the top. I can't accomplish this because the LASTNAME, His & Her name and Photo issue.

Please help! Our pastor wants this out soon and I am at a total loss!

Blessings and thanks in advance!

Help? Is there anything that I can do?

KrimsonStorm wrote:Help? Is there anything that I can do?

I haven't done one of these in a long time, so I don't want to give you the wrong info. I've contacted one of the techs about this thread, so hopefully he'll be by in a bit.

NeilZ wrote:

KrimsonStorm wrote:Help? Is there anything that I can do?

I haven't done one of these in a long time, so I don't want to give you the wrong info. I've contacted one of the techs about this thread, so hopefully he'll be by in a bit.

Oh, thank you so much!

It is possible to make the custom report look and work like the built-in report. It is considerably more difficult.

In broad strokes, what is needed is Data Grouping in the report body and lots of variables. The whole report output ends up in the Group Footer, because you need to loop through all the records in each family to be able to calculate the LASTNAME, His & Her field.

1. To get that top line name field formatted, you need a couple of variables. They will take the first person's last name, upper case it, add the comma, then look at the directory sequence (pers_no) of each record to see if it is 1 or 2 and if so, add the first name. It then has to look at the second person's last name to see if it is the same as the first person's last name and if not, add the last name as well.
   You then have variables for each of the individual fields that print in columns below, firstname, born, married, phone, and e-mail. This is tricky, because if someone doesn't have a married date, you still need to skip a line, so the next person's information will line up across all fields on the next row. If there is a mobile phone in the last person's record, you need to skip two lines.
2. This will be resolved when all the report output fields are moved into the group footer.

Unfortunately, to go into more detail and type out all the logic in all of those variables would be creating the report for you, which I'm not able to do here in the forum. We have an Online Training Video series specifically for the Custom Reports functionality and probably half of the curriculum and time is spent covering creating variables, using IIF() - inline if - logic and data grouping in reports. That video series is 2 hr 21 min long and is $50:

https://www.powerchurch.com/training/vi ... .php?id=21

The other alternative would be to have our custom report service create the report for you. This specific report would be $120, but each report is quoted on a case by case basis. If you wanted to go that route, you can e-mail customreports@powerchurch.com to get the process started.

If you want to give it a whirl, feel free to post back here if you get hung up on a variable expression or any specific step along the way.