Tech Forum

I am hoping someone has an answer to this... This is my 2nd year of doing tithing settlement and it seems crazy that I have to print labels only to have to attach them to an envelope. I tried setting the printer to an envelope setting but it would not print. Any suggestions?

We don't typically mail the donor statements, we just hand them out at church. I found that with the windowed envelopes I can fold the header so that it shows in the window and I can seal the envelope and still see who it is for. Checks work nicely with the windowed envelopes as well, and I imagine that the official tax statements will as well, though this is my first year so I haven't tried.

If you are proficient in MLS reports and proficient in something like MS Word you can copy member names and addresses from an appropriate report such as the Abbreviated Directory of Members and past it into a word document and manipulate it for output as a CSV file for use in a envelope mail merge. I have done this using MS Word 2003, 2007, and 2010. I find the best experience has been with Word 2010. I don't use LibreOffice so I don't know if it has this capability.

Although I find even this more tedious than printing the labels.

While I type, I'm actually printing onto envelopes using LibreOffice. I downloaded the ward directory from the website as a *.CSV file. Yes, LibreOffice has a Mail merge capability, but you'll have to do some searching through LibreOffice documentation for the details of how it works. Briefly, what I've done is imported the CSV file into a LibreOffice database (not sure if that part is necessary) and used that for the mail merge. In LibreOffice Writer, choose Tools -> Mail Merge Wizard to begin the process. I just manually removed the names I don't want to print before I printed it (it "prints" blank envelopes, which I just recycle). I don't know if there's a smoother process to do this, but that's what has worked for me.