You can quickly see a list of all students in a particular grade using the new student easy list. On the Information tab, click Students > Easy Lists. Select Grade List, then choose between Formation Grade or Grade/Degree, and select the grade you want to see. When you click Apply/OK, your list displays, and you can customize the columns you see, print the list, and create a letter to send to this selection of students.

In all relevant search boxes, we added an option to Show ID Drop-Down Lists. This determines whether you see the drop-down arrow when searching by an ID.

You can select this option if you prefer selecting from the list. However, if you have a very large data file, we recommend clearing this option. That way, your search results load faster and you do not have to look through a long list.

Whether you're planning for a conversion or just want to neaten up your records, you can use our new Clean Up Data process.

This process gathers information around families, members, financial data, phone and email types, and families shared with other programs (if applicable). It presents potential issues in your data, then allows you to view the affected records and perform any actions to clean up the data. For example, you can delete any unneeded archived family records, combine duplicate sacraments, and fix any missing or incorrect fund activities. You are in control of which changes, if any, are made.

If you have multiple Church or Formation programs using the same data file, you can select which one to clean up. On the first screen in the dialog box, enter the appropriate number for Show Church N= and/or Show Formation N=. When you're ready to re-examine the data for these data sets, click Recalculate.

Here's a cool feature within the new process: Click Show List to open a separate dialog box that displays the affected records. From this list, you can exit the cleanup process and go to each record in question. The list remains open so you can jump to the next affected record. When you're finished making the necessary changes, you can go back to the cleanup process and pick up where you left off.

For example, the process shows three families that don't have a head of household listed. You could use the Add Head button to make the oldest member the head, but let's say you want to go to each family and select a head of household yourself. Click Show List to open the dialog box, then click Go to Family to display the record in the Families window. Select a head for the first family and save the record. In the dialog box, click to go to the next family and repeat the necessary steps.

For details on all the features in this process, see Clean Up Your Data.

Let's say you need to add an emergency contact for a student. That contact is also a member in your PDS data, so you have all their information on a record. Now, you can add a contact, select that existing member, and the program will fill in all the information for you!

On the Information tab, click Students > Contacts. Click Add Contact, click No to borrowing a contact, then click Yes to the next prompt to use an existing member. Locate and select the contact(s) from the list, then click Use Marked Member(s) to add the information on new contact tabs. Note that this is a one-time copy, and the contact information does not change when you update the member's record.

We heard a great idea about entering parishioner names more efficiently when adding a family. The Middle and Nickname fields now display in the Family Name dialog box. That way, you don't have to go edit each member record after adding the family record.

With this in place, we also made it so the Informal Salutation uses the nicknames by default.

We modified the Totals in the All Funds section of the Family Overview. Now, the Balance Due only includes amounts for the current period.

The USPS updated postal rates, effective January 22, 2023. These changes were made in your PDS program and released on Monday, January 23. Next time you run EZ-Mail, you'll receive a message that allows you to download the new postal forms. For details on the changes, see 2023 Postage Price Changes (USPS website).