This record contains information about an individual member of a family. You cannot have a member record without first having a family record to relate the member to. In creating member records, you must open the family record, then click on the My Members button for the family the member belongs to. When you are working with a member record for that family, you can click on the "Add New" button to add a member to the family. The "Add New" button is hidden when you are browsing the Member table.
The first entry is to define the relationship of the individual to the family, i.e., is he the Father or Male Head of Household, etc. The record then contains data elements for the name of the member, including his/her own Last Name, and the name by which he/she likes to be called.
Following this, there are spaces for a number of dates, including when (year) the individual became a "member" (however you define it) of this church, followed by birth date, anniversary date, baptism, etc. These dates should include month/day/year (mm/dd/yyyy). If you don't know the exact date, you should have a local default procedure, such as always using June 30 or December 31 if you don't know anything but the year.
In the upper right corner there are check marks for baptized and confirmed. These should be used if you don't know the dates.
A check mark indicates he/she is a member of your denomination.
The status combination box contains the allowed statuses. Immediately below that box is a Status Date box. This should be filled out with the date of the current status. The status and date are used to calculate Vital Statistics for your church. "Status" represents the current point in time. A member might conceivably have 2 or more different statuses during the course of the year. What should be recorded is the last or latest status, and the date of attaining that status.
There is a button "Display Member's Activities" which will display a listing of the activities this member is involved with. When you click on the button, you are presented with a 2 column datasheet. The left side allows you to select a member by name, and the right side, an activity by name. You can enroll the current member in any activities at this point by selecting his name and the activity.
The lower right portion of the form is a big blank. It is reserved for pictures of your members. To use the pictures, you need to do two things:
| Read in your photos of your members and install them in the directory "c:\cbw5\pictures". They must be in what is called bitmap format - with a file type of ".bmp". You can give them names like "GordonJones.bmp" or use their member number which appears on this form (Member Linkage ID", e.g. "123.bmp". |
| Then enter that picture filename in the "Photo Path" text box without the .bmp filetype. The program will add the .bmp to the name you enter. |
To create the .bmp pictures, you go through the following sequence with whatever software you use for viewing and editing photographs:
| If you start with pictures from a digital camera, you will probably read the images in as .jpg files. If you use a scanner, I'm not sure what the file type is, but it probably is also a .jpg file. |
| Open the file for viewing. |
| Select the segment of the picture you want to use, and use the mouse to frame that segment. The frame that will be used in the Members form is roughly square. |
| Do an Edit | Crop, or click on the Crop button. This will delete the extraneous part of the photograph. |
| Do a File | Save As... You want to save as a .bmp file, and give it the name you want to use to locate it (see above). Be sure to select the c:\cbw5\pictures folder (directory) for the place to park the picture. If that sub directory (pictures) doesn't exist, create it by clicking on "new" then "Folder" while the c:\cbw5 directory is selected. |
| After you have created the .bmp file, you want to edit it for size. You should be given a dialog to spell out the dimensions you want. You may have to do this several times to get the right dimensions, but start with specifying a width of 209 pixels, and a height of 200 pixels. |
| Go to the member record and enter the name (e.g., GordonJones) in the Photo Path text box. You will have to move off that record and move back for it to get the signal to display the photo. If you aren't getting as much of the selected segment as you wanted, go back and reduce the width/height parameters; if the photo is too small, go back and increase them. When you enter the first number, the .bmp editor will probably automatically adjust the other to retain the relationship of height to width which you have established in your cropping. |
If everything works o.k., when you next move to the member's record, the photo will appear on the form. If it doesn't appear, it will be because you didn't convert the picture to a .bmp file, or because the picture isn't in the folder "c:\cbw5\pictures", or because you entered the ".bmp" when you entered the path name. If you're like I am, you might also have made a typographical error in entering the name....
Be sure you test this entry with one member and see the photo on his/her form before you spend a lot of time and effort doing all the members!!!!