Every few years, somebody on the leadership team asks for a printed directory. Usually it is the same person who still keeps a paper calendar and does not trust that the church app will be there when the internet is down. You do not have to argue with them. You just have to get the data out cleanly, format it in a way that will not embarrass anyone, and decide, before you print five hundred copies, what you are willing to leave out.
A printed church handbook is not hard to make. It is hard to make well— consistent formatting, no duplicate households, no address for the family that asked to be left off, no page break that splits a household in half. This guide walks through pulling the export and turning it into something you would actually hand a visitor.
Start with the export, not the layout
The temptation is to open a design program first and start typing names from memory. Resist it. Every name you type by hand is a chance to misspell something or leave someone out. Start instead with a CSV export of your people directory — the same records your team already uses for groups, serving, and care, exported as a flat file of rows and columns.
A clean export gives you one row per person or household, with consistent columns for name, phone, email, and address. That consistency is what makes the next steps — sorting, formatting, printing — go quickly instead of turning into a week of manual cleanup.
Decide: households or individuals
Before you export anything, decide what a handbook entry actually looks like. Most churches print by household — the Andersons, with both parents and kids listed under one address and phone number — rather than one line per person. That is usually the right call for a print handbook: it is shorter, it is easier to scan, and it matches how most families actually think of themselves.
If your records are not cleanly grouped into households yet, sort that out before you export, not after. Two adults with the same address and different last names, a college student still listed under a parent's household, a widow whose late husband is still on the account — these are the messy edges that make a printed book look careless if they slip through. For more on getting this structure right, see households vs. individuals.
Pull the CSV
Once your households are in reasonable shape, export the directory as a CSV. In SundayBridge, that is a straightforward download from the people section — every row a person or household, every column a field: name, phone, email, mailing address, and whatever else you have on file.
Open the file in a spreadsheet program before you touch anything else. This is your chance to catch problems while they are still cheap to fix:
- Duplicate rows. The same person exported twice, usually from an old merge or a data entry mistake years ago.
- Blank fields where you expected data. A missing phone number is fine to print as blank. A missing last name usually means something went wrong in the original record.
- Formatting inconsistencies. Phone numbers stored three different ways, addresses missing a zip code, names in all caps from an old import years ago.
Fix what you can fix in the spreadsheet. Anything that looks like a deeper data problem — a household split across two records, a person who shows up twice under slightly different spellings — is worth cleaning up in the source records themselves before your next export, not just papering over in the print file. See cleaning up a messy database if that list is longer than a few rows.
Sort and paginate before you format
A handbook that is not sorted alphabetically by last name is not a handbook, it is a list. Sort your CSV by last name (or household name) before you move it into a layout. If you are printing by street or by small group instead of alphabetically, sort by that field, but pick one order and be consistent all the way through — do not switch conventions halfway through the book because one section felt easier to group differently.
Once it is sorted, think about page breaks. If you are using a mail-merge template with several entries per page, check that a single household is never split across two pages. It looks sloppy, and it is the kind of detail people notice in a printed document even when they would never notice it on a screen.
Ask who wants to be left out
This is the step that gets skipped most often, and it is the one that causes the most trouble afterward. Not everyone wants their home address and cell number in two hundred copies of a book that sits in car consoles and diaper bags for the next three years. Before you finalize the export, give the congregation a real chance to opt out — an announcement, a line in the bulletin, a short note from the office — and remove those rows from your working file.
A privacy pass takes fifteen minutes. Skipping it can turn a nice-to-have project into an awkward conversation with a family who did not expect their address printed and mailed to every other household in the church.
Move the file into a printable format
You do not need publishing software to turn a CSV into a handbook. A few common paths work fine:
- Mail merge in a word processor. Set up a template with the fields you want — name, address, phone — and merge the CSV in. This is the fastest route if you already have a simple layout you like.
- A spreadsheet formatted for print. Column widths set, headers repeated on each page, printed in booklet mode. Not elegant, but fast and entirely usable for an internal-facing directory.
- A page-layout template. If you want something that looks more like a real booklet — cover page, section dividers by group or street — a layout program with the CSV imported as a data table gets you there without retyping a single name.
Whichever route you take, print one test copy before you run the full batch. Check the page breaks, check that nobody's entry got cut off at a column boundary, and have someone other than the person who built the file proofread a few pages. A second set of eyes catches things the person closest to the spreadsheet stops seeing.
Treat it as a snapshot, not a system
The moment the handbook goes to print, it starts going out of date. Someone moves. A new family joins. A phone number changes. That is fine — a printed directory has never been meant to be current, only to be useful for a season. Put the date on the cover or the first page so nobody mistakes a two-year-old book for this week's reality, and treat the next print run as its own project rather than an update to the last one.
If your team wants a directory that stays current between print runs, that is what the searchable, always-current version in SundayBridge is for — the print handbook is the once-a-year artifact, not the daily source of truth. For the day-to-day version your staff and volunteers actually check against, see a church directory your team trusts.
What to skip if you are short on time
Not every church needs a full booklet with a cover and section dividers. If you are working with limited time before a deadline — a new-member class, a homecoming Sunday, an anniversary event — a simple sorted list printed from the export, stapled together, does the job. Save the polished version for a year when someone has the time to make it nice. A plain, accurate list handed out on time beats a beautiful one that is still in layout the week it was needed.
If print projects like this keep landing on the same overloaded person's desk, it is worth stepping back and looking at how admin work gets divided in general. See a weekly church admin rhythm for a way to spread it out instead of letting it pile up before every big event.