"total export" - does it include Notes?

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djklord
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"total export" - does it include Notes?

Post by djklord »

As far as I can tell, although, I haven't spent a lot of time looking, even the new (in v.5.55) capability to do a "total export" is not exporting the Notes associated with each partner.

Is this correct, or did I miss it?

I would really like to be able to export that information.

Dan Lord
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Re: "total export" - does it include Notes?

Post by jmuehleisen »

Dan,

The answer to your question is, "It depends."

If you are exporting to the csv or xls format, the answer is "No." The notes don't export (due to limitations in the xls and csv formats).

If you are exporting to the .dbf format, the answer is "Yes."

Tell me how you would like to use this and maybe I can come up with a possible solution for you.
John Muehleisen
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Re: "total export" - does it include Notes?

Post by djklord »

Hello John,

Thanks for your quick response.

I know this defeats the purpose of an electronic donor list, but my wife likes to have a paper copy of our donor information to work with; including at least the following information:

name
address
phone numbers
e-mail addresses
special dates (eg. b'days)
and Notes

About twice a year she generates this printed list. It would be very helpful to be able to generate a Word doc right out of DM, but as it is now, this is a very manual and tedious process.

Dan
P.S. Can MS Access or the db part of Open Office handle .dbf files?
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Re: "total export" - does it include Notes?

Post by djklord »

John, and others who may be interested,

I answered my own question. I was able to open the .dbf files using MS Access 2007. From there I can manipulate the data before creating a Word document. I think this may be sufficient. I'll keep working with it.

Dan
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Re: "total export" - does it include Notes?

Post by djklord »

Yes. This is working well.

I exported all to a .dbf file.
I opened the donor.dbf file using MS Access 2007.
I hid the fields I do not want in my Word Doc.
I published the result to an .rtf file.
I saved the RTF file as a Word Doc.
I set small margins and changed to landscape orientation.
I modified the table (in Word) so that the cell size would adjust to the contents of each cell.
I decreased the font size to 9 points.
Now, it looks good - although I may go back and un-hide another field or two.

Thank you, John, for your help with this - that is, creating the export all to .dbf and then letting me know the Notes were included in that.
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Re: "total export" - does it include Notes?

Post by jmuehleisen »

Glad to help.

It sounds like you are using this to create a custom report of some kind.

Do me a favor if you would. E-Mail the report as a pdf (or a word doc) once you get it fine-tuned. I'd like to see what you have come up with.

it may be that others could benefit from the report layout you designed and I could include that layout option as a standard feature in a future version of the DM.
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Re: "total export" - does it include Notes?

Post by jmuehleisen »

When I wrote my last reply, I had not read all of your posts carefully. Sorry.

I know exactly what you mean about wanting to work from a paper report. I do the same. I still like paper.

But still send me a copy of the layout you end up with. I'm sure others will find that report useful and I can include it right in the program.

And, as a side note, the FoxFire custom report writer in the DM (not to be confused with FireFox the browser) will be dropped in the next major update to the program. The terms of the license have changed from a "buy a flat rate license for all you can eat" to a "per seat" fee per designer.

So, folks that want to do custom reports will need to do just what you have done, export and then write the reports in Access (or some other report writer).
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Re: "total export" - does it include Notes?

Post by djklord »

Hello John (and others who may be reading this thread),

I will send in the results of my report generation when I've had time to fine-tune it. I think I'd like to include another field or two, and I want to take it out of table format since some fields have a wide variance in the width of their contents, and place the data for each partner in one paragraph - perhaps with two columns of data on a page. (sorry for the run-on sentence) So, it will take a bit of hand-tuning after exporting from DM.

I am working in Word 2007, but I would guess that OpenOffice document program can do all I need to do, too.
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Re: "total export" - does it include Notes?

Post by DaveJohnson »

I am giving this a try, but have no experience with MS Access. I have Access 2003. In DM I export the dbf. Then I try to open this in Access and I get this message:
"The Microsoft Jet database engine could not find the object 'export_names.dbf'. Make sure the object exists and that you spell its name and path correctly."

By object do they mean file? The file exists, and is spelled correctly. Not sure what to try next.

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Re: "total export" - does it include Notes?

Post by jmuehleisen »

Try "linking" access to the file instead of trying to "open" it.

The advantage of that is that Access will do a fresh query of that file everytime it starts.

So, when needed, just do a fresh export of the data, and then Access will grab the latest and greatest version of your data.

Or, you can link Access directly to the DM tables. There is danger there, though, in that you are touching live data rather than a copy of it.

You may need to download the Visual FoxPro 6 ODBC driver. You can find out whether you already have the Visual FoxPro ODBC Driver installed by checking to see if a file called VFPODBC.DLL exists in your Windows System directory.

If you need the driver, you can download it from here: http://www.donormanager.com/special-downloads
John Muehleisen
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