mailing labels: apparent bugs

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rmrichesjr
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mailing labels: apparent bugs

#1

Post by rmrichesjr »

My Bishop informed me of some odd things in the way mailing labels are printing, and I'm seeing a similar but different set of odd things. Some of them look like bugs. My calling is assistant ward clerk, membership.
  • - For one couple, my Bishop gets one label showing both first names and the last/family name. In the list to select whose labels to print, I see two separate names and get two separate labels, one with each first/given name. I double-checked that LCR shows them in the same household and family.

    - For one part-member family, the label shows only the name of the member sister, not the non-member husband. That might make sense if the labels are based on household rather than family information. However, it sounds like a poor way to help the non-member husband feel welcomed by the Church.

    - For each of two of the widows whose respective husbands' deaths have long since been recorded and are showing up in LCR as deceased spouses, my Bishop gets a label that shows the relevant deceased husband's name along with the living widow's name. For me, each label has only the widow's name. The labels for other widows show only the relevant widow's name.

    - For two couples with different last/family names, I'm told the different last/family names aren't being printed.
Are other wards seeing similar odd behavior from the label printing feature?

Does anyone have insight into workarounds?
russellhltn
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Re: mailing labels: apparent bugs

#2

Post by russellhltn »

rmrichesjr wrote: Mon Dec 12, 2022 6:34 pm For one part-member family, the label shows only the name of the member sister, not the non-member husband.
What about for other part-member households? Does it track the ward directory if the spouse shows or not?
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rmrichesjr
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Re: mailing labels: apparent bugs

#3

Post by rmrichesjr »

I don't have a list of part-member families and am not acquainted with any others off the top of my head. In the case of the family where the mailing label prints only the member wife's name, the directory shows the whole family, including the non-member husband.
rmrichesjr
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Re: mailing labels: apparent bugs

#4

Post by rmrichesjr »

After being informed my Bishop was using some non-default options, the inconsistent results issue is gone. He was selecting the 'Households' tab rather than the default 'Individuals' tab. Then, in the second round of the dialog, he was clicking on 'Household Name' -> 'First Last'. When I use those options, I get the same results as my Bishop did. Two puzzles remain:

1) For the part-member household, the non-member husband's name shows up in the selection list (next to the check-boxes). However, his name does not show up on the labels.

2) For the two widows in question, each widow's name appears by itself in the select list, but the deceased husband's name shows up on the labels.
MHall09
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Re: mailing labels: apparent bugs

#5

Post by MHall09 »

I was just informed of this bug by our bishop. We printed off labels for households to send out Christmas cards. There was a brother that had his deceased wife listed, while there was a sister with a deceased husband that did not have her late husband listed. This is a problem that shouldn't be happening.
lajackson
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Re: mailing labels: apparent bugs

#6

Post by lajackson »

MHall09 wrote: Wed Dec 14, 2022 8:22 pm This is a problem that shouldn't be happening.
Since 1990 we have been going through printed labels to remove the ones that we feel should not be used. Since there have never been more than five or six we needed to replace in our large ward, we usually just address those envelopes by hand.
rmrichesjr
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Re: mailing labels: apparent bugs

#7

Post by rmrichesjr »

lajackson wrote: Wed Dec 14, 2022 8:57 pm Since 1990 we have been going through printed labels to remove the ones that we feel should not be used. Since there have never been more than five or six we needed to replace in our large ward, we usually just address those envelopes by hand.
Of course, there's the option for some cases to select the 'Individuals' tab and manually select the relevant individuals. It could leave a lot of a page of labels blank, though.
adamu
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Re: mailing labels: apparent bugs

#8

Post by adamu »

Yes, I saw the deceased members names in the list of printed records. I found that this was due to the preferred name for the household. Changing that fixed the issue.

I didn't like many of the choices for the mailing labels.
* centered rather than left aligned
* using full name if no preferred name is provided, which includes middle names.
* using full state name, rather than state abbreviation.

So I wrote my own code to do this. You can find it here: https://github.com/adamulrich/lds-mailing-labels with instructions. If you have run a python script before, this is pretty straight forward. I use an HTML table scraper to pull the data out of the preview and get it into CSV format.

Note that you will get asserts when your data isn't clean, such as:
* missing zip codes
* you have ", apt 1" in the first line rather than using the address 2 field.
* missing city or state values.

It took about 30 edits to get our records cleaned up, but I'm glad that it found all the errors in our addresses.

The output is designed for standard Avery 5160 labels.

I drop all given names after the first given name.
I left align.
I translate long state to state abbreviation.

the output translates this:

Adam Matthew Ulrich
1 Main St
Auburn, Washington 98092-0001

to

Adam Ulrich
1 MAIN ST
AUBURN, WA 98092-0001
russellhltn
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Re: mailing labels: apparent bugs

#9

Post by russellhltn »

adamu wrote: Mon Dec 19, 2022 1:29 pm Note that you will get asserts when your data isn't clean, such as:
* you have ", apt 1" in the first line rather than using the address 2 field.
It's been a long time, but I thought that some printouts wouldn't print the second line, creating problems.

Since much of the work has moved on-line/in-app from the old paper forms, that may no longer be a concern. But I would check to see if there's any unintended consequence to moving things to the second line.

adamu wrote: Mon Dec 19, 2022 1:29 pm I drop all given names after the first given name.
Realize that if you were to send mail to M. Russell Ballard, it would be printed as "Melvin Ballard".
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adamu
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Re: mailing labels: apparent bugs

#10

Post by adamu »

The python is there for anyone to modify or fork if they want to contribute further.

No, M. Russell Ballard would become M. Ballard.
No, the second line is used 80% of the time with apartment addresses. We simply had old addresses that hadn't been touched in a long time that had not been standardized. Address 2 is not going anywhere.
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