Having finished some 350 membership cards, and a bunch more volunteer cards for SRI, I definitely can say that we NEED something better....

We have an Eltron P210i plastic card printer that is slow as molasses, and our membership database is in past perfect. So far I am unable to find ANYTHING that can take the database, and create membership cards from it automatically.

The way (very very slow and tedious) I have been doing it is with photoshop CS3, manually typing the names, member number, and member level into a nice template I had made up. Between the typing, saving, and printing, each card takes nearly 4.5 minutes to complete. This is completely unnacceptable for many reasons.

first and foremost, I have everybody breathing down my back because they were not done in a timely fashion... This is totally understandable. Being that each one takes 4.5 minutes, on top of my photography work, and other things going on in life that take priority; it has taken a LONG time to get these completed.

Secondly, I am the only one who knows how this system works. Explaining the procedure to others not familiar with photoshop would probably end up creating much more greif than there is already, since it is a tedious, somewhat complicated process (to those not familiar with PS).

Finally, there should be a much simpler way to do this. There has to be some way to yank this info out of past perfect, insert it into a nice template with graphics, and automatically print. This is rediculous how many steps it currently takes to produce a single card, let alone over 450 at 4.5 minutes each (longer for the volunteer cards since they are photo-id type).



We used to use filemaker for our membership database, and it automatically did this with ease, but now it is just plain rediculous how long it takes to produce a single card.



Anyways, getting to the point.... Are there any cheap or free programs out there that can very easily do what we need to do? They need to be foolproof so anyone can use them, and need to be able to automatically grab the info from either past perfect, or from an excel spreadsheet.

Just a thought - have you looked into having the work done by some kind of third-party printing/sign/badge shop? I know the cost may outweight the benefit right now, but it may be easier to pass on to others in the future if you have a source and process.
Have you checked with the software vendor to see how or if they have recommendations for what you are doing?
I wish I had better suggestions for you as far as other options, but I think you're already ahead of a lot of us.

Sully

have you tried to export the data to excel

rename the original, and then start excel, and go file>open>(renamed file)
you have to click view all files first to see it in the browser
If it works the export wizard should come up and follow the examples
I've used excel to open a few different databases to extract the data

dr

Go back to it. It is a great program. I believe that you could export the member database right from Past Perfect if I understand their literature right.

I haven't tried these guys, but they sound promising:

http://www.museumdatasolutions.com

Software development costs could be cheap depending on the size of your organization and the number of disgruntled members due to poor membership service.

I've been looking into this problem also. The Eltron P210i is capable of supporting batch printing, so what remains in question is: "how do you send field data from a database such as MS Excel to the printer?" There are quite a few companies that offer software in the $200 - $500 dollar range that will do just that.

Most of them let you create fields, such as first name, last name, membership number, etc. and associate photos, fingerprint scans and barcodes with the database, then output to the ID card printer using search criteria such as by membership number, last name field ranges, this card, all cards and so forth.

Here's a couple of links to the more reasonably priced packages:

http://www.badgebuilder.com/xcart/custo ... .php?cat=1

http://www.advancedidcreator.com/aidc.asp

There are many others, including shareware. A google search for "ID card printer software" will turn them up.

Fred
SRI

The simple solution is use mail merge. Our membership card is done in WORD. WORD will let you import photo elements. Our membership card has our logo and my signature as picture elements. Then the member’s name, expiration date, gift shop discount and ticket discount are merge fields. The membership list itself is in EXCEL. When its time to print membership cards, we use the mail merge feature in WORD. The program is directed to merge to a new document. The new document gets reviewed; if everything is okay then it’s printed.

We use business card stock and a HP color printer. The biggest trick was building the mail merge template but once that was done, it’s a breeze. We also have a second template for creating mailing labels.

When we do fulfillment the list of names is run through three mail merge programs. The first is to generate the thank you letter. The second is the membership card and the last the mailing label. The mailing label is stuck on the envelope and then the thank you letter and membership card goes inside. To make this process painless, alphabetize the list before merging. It makes life easy.

Another trick is to use window envelopes. You mail merge the thank you letter, fold insert and seal, no missing with labels.

Unless you are married to the idea of printing on plastic, you can also combine the card and the thank you letter as we do. Our letter is printed on cardstock that has a pre-perforated card that punches out of the lower right-hand corner. The operation is similar to Mark's. We export our database of names/addresses to a WORD mail merge document and then print the letters/cards.

Thanks

...and if you still want plastic? Laminate the cards.