Archive for March, 2010

OK to remove confusing mail-merge options?

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

There is part of the Letters -> One Letter and Letters -> Mass Mailing windows that I suspect is very little used, and can be confusing.

That part is Section 3 in Letters -> One Letter and Section 5 in Letters -> Mass Mailing: the parts where you can specify the name of the file in which to save the merged letters, and whether or not to use a standard filename.

My impression is that first, there is very little reason to use this to review previous merges – you can always just re-merge a letter or letters instead. And it just adds to the confusion.

The only reason to pick a different (non-standard) filename for the merged letter(s) is if you want to keep old merges on file, each with its own name. But that also is going to become very confusing, and if you really want copies, you could print them instead.

Does any one reading this use those options, or think I should keep them in the program? Please let me know by writing a Reply to this blog. And if you don’t use them or see a reason to keep them, a quick reply to let me know you’ve thought about it would also be great! Thank you.

Church IT Roundtable Survey

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Tony Dye, of the Church IT (Information Technology) Rountable and ChMS (Church Management Software) Google Group, is doing a small survey on church management software used by churches.

While DONATION is certainly not a full church management software solution, a lot of DONATION users in churches use it instead of one, because they don’t need all of the other features of a fuller ChMS solution.

If you would be willing to participate in Tony’s survey, either by filling in a short set of questions, or letting him interview you by phone for 5-10 minutes, you can find it at:

http://groups.google.com/group/chms/browse_thread/thread/e19af09f92d7d073

Thanks.