Common Printing Problems

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Common Printing Problems

 

Following are the two most common printing issues we hear about from CMD users. If your problem with printing is not covered on this topic page, please contact Software for Ministry for additional help.

Missing Names

Missing Individuals. If individual names are not printing that you think should be, first check to make sure that they do indeed meet the criteria you selected on the Selection Page of Print Names. Second, check to make sure that if they do not have an address that you have checked the Include Names with No Address check box on Print Control. If an individual name is missing from a church directory listing, check to see if that individual is properly marked with the Include in Directory check box on the Enter/Modify/Delete Names dialog.

Missing Families. If one or more families are not included when printing a church directory, you can generally remedy the problem by one or more of these steps:

1.Check to make sure the Include Family in Directory check box is correctly set on the family's record in Enter/Modify/Delete Names.

2.Make sure that if the family does not have an address that you can checked the Include Names with No Address check box on Print Control.

3.Make sure that you have included more than just a last name in the family's Family Name field. This is critical!!! If your file has more than one family with the same last name, only the first family with a given last name will be printed in family-based lists. See the Family Name field help topic for more information on how to cure this (it's easy!).

Duplicate Labels

Some lists may generate more than one label or envelope in response to a selection. For example, if you asked for a newsletter list, it's possible that you might see labels like this:

John & Mary Smith    ...followed by one that's headed by...

Mary & John Smith

This simply means that both husband and wife met the criteria for your list, and thus both were included. When CMD processes names, it checks to see if a name qualifies according to the selection criteria you made on the Selection page. If it does, the name is inserted into the list of names to be printed. As it's being printed, CMD checks to see if you directed the program to include the Spouse. If so, he or she will be included. That a spouse is included in this manner does not affect the fact that the spouse might be on the list to be printed because he or she also meets the criteria. If he or she does, then a label for them will be generated as well.

How do you solve this? If it's the newsletter list, then make sure only one adult per household is marked to receive the newsletter. If it's some other selection such as Board Members from a church officers list, then you'll just have a wasted label or two to discard as you are preparing your mailing. You'll find that in most cases, however, narrowing the selection criteria almost always solves this problem.

There is one additional situation where you might see a label printed for every member of the family. For example, if all you selected was a list of Families Marked for the Directory, and you chose to print labels, you would get one label printed for every member.

This is because you are asking for a family-based list but printing an individual-based output form. CMD allows you to mix family and individual lists because under some circumstances such a mixture will produce the report or list you need. Family-based output forms such as Church Directory, Family Visitation Card, Rotary Cards, etc, won't have this problem in family-based lists, CMD is able to use the Family Name field to tell when a family has already been printed.

CMD can't use that criteria for printing individual forms such as mailing labels, visitation reports, etc, because it has no way of knowing which family member to print from among many.