Steven Zahm@ Sue
RE: I have instances where there are multiple cell phone or email addresses entered for a particular entry. These show up fine when displaying the directory, but when I export the data, only the first cell phone or email address is included in the file.
Yes, I believe this is correct. What you need to do is use the phone and/or email export tools in addition to the “All” tool. You can use Excel with a VLOOKUP formula to “link” the data. (I thin VLOOKUP is the correct function, its been awhile since I’ve built such formulas in Excel).
The reason is it is exceedingly difficult to export relational data from a database into a single “flat” CSV file. This is, for example, why WP does not export its data as a CSV file. (Yes, you can find plugins to do this, but, they do not export all the data.) It is a trade off that has to be made in order to make the exported data accessible. Ideally you would want the file exported as an XML (which can be structured to capture relational data) file but that is not an accessible file format that most will not be able to work with.
RE: we would like to exclude the year and only collect the month and day in each of those fields. If I change the date format in the Settings area, leaving off the “, Y” currently in the default setting, will this work? Or is this setting only used to format the display of a date?
You will have to enter a year when adding the date. It does not need to be the real year, but it will have to be a valid past year. Then you can use the display date format option to not display the year.
The year needs captured so date based queries can be performed such as those for upcoming birthdays and anniversaries.
When I’ve setup directories for churches I’ve used a common date such as 1900 or 1970 to capture “unknown” years. That way they were easily distinguished from “real” dates in the “raw” data when we had to work from it.
Hope this helps!