Happy New Year! We wish you and yours good health, new adventures and plenty of joy in 2023!

In 2023, we will continue sending our newsletter quarterly on the first Wednesday of January, April, July, and October. Each newsletter will contain articles for our desktop and Web Edition users. We will also continue our popular series "This Day/Month in History" as well as spotlights of clients’ online collections.

We look forward to assisting you with your PastPerfect software, whether you use our desktop or cloud-based solution. Our normal business hours are Monday through Friday, 9:00am to 5:30pm Eastern. You can reach us by calling 1-800-562-6080 or emailing support@museumsoftware.com.

After the start of each new year, it is important to back up data and perform a Reindex to make sure yearly dues and donation totals are correctly calculated for Contacts.

Here are the steps to ensure amounts are displayed correctly in your donations and dues summary information in PastPerfect 5.0.

If you have any questions about this process, please call our support office. Our team members are happy to help!

PastPerfect 5.0 comes with powerful list management tools for your collection records. With Catalog Lists, you can view, print, export, and manage groups of catalog records all at once. Lists can be built using queries or by manually adding records.

Once items are on a list, you can view the records and images, print reports, export data to Excel, add items to an exhibit or outgoing loan, select records to share publicly with the PastPerfect Online add-on, and make global changes.

If you are starting a data cleanup project in the new year, the Catalog Lists Global Change functions can help with consistency. With Global Change, you select a field to edit and enter the data as you want it to appear in Value. When you make the global change, the field's contents are replaced with that data for all records on the list. Not all fields are available for Global Change, but commonly used fields like Collection, Status, Event, and Condition, as well as location fields can be changed. Some fields designed for multiple entries like People, Subjects, and Search Terms can be selected; however, it is important to use caution with these as the Global Change replaces all data in the field. We recommend making a data backup to your hard drive before making any Global Change and carefully reviewing that the changes are correct before new work is started.

For more information on using Catalog Lists, you can watch our PastPerfect 5.0 Catalog Lists tech tip series at https://museumsoftware.com/videos.html under Video Tech Tips. We also have a User Guide chapter on this topic at https://museumsoftware.com/WebHelp/#t=Chapters%2FPP5-15a.htm.

Winter storms, hurricanes, fires, and other disaster events can knock out your power and your network, which in turn can jeopardize your data, images and media in PastPerfect. Without a regular backup routine of both hard drive and external backups, you run the risk of experiencing data, images and media loss. Data recovery is only as good as your latest backup. Unfortunately, we have seen clients lose years of data entry and images. Creating backups are an easy way to keep your hard work safe.

You can find all of our backup recommendations in our Knowledge Base article.

The latest update for PastPerfect 5.0 users is 5.0F8. Available as a free download from our website (https://museumsoftware.com/softwareupdates.html), the update is cumulative and includes minor new features and fixes. If you are updating from PastPerfect 5.0F6 or an earlier Version 5.0 program and you are using a networked PastPerfect, please run the update at each workstation.

Please review the update instructions at our Knowledge Base before running the update. Before you begin, you want to back up data to hard drive, perform a reindex of all files, make a second data hard drive backup, and close the program on all PastPerfect computers.

If you have any questions about updating your PastPerfect 5.0 program, please contact our support team.

Our latest update included several new features:

To see a full list of features and fixes from each update, click "Version History" in the footer while you are logged into Web Edition software.

We have recently added a handful of articles to the Web Edition section our Knowledge Base. If you need assistance outside of our support team's business hours, our Knowledge Base is a useful resource in addition to the User Guide.

New articles:

Clients frequently ask about end-of-year reports to summarize work completed in collections or funds received through donations, dues, and other development activities. With Web Edition's Query screens, you can filter based on date fields (and other fields) and select which fields you want to include in your results. You can then export your results to CSV or select one of the printed reports.

Before you begin, you will want to make sure the fields you want to filter on and include in your results are available on the Query screens. You can select these fields in Settings | Catalog Filter & Option Fields or Settings | Contacts Filter & Option Fields. For step-by-step instructions on choosing filter and option fields, read our Knowledge Base article, "How can I customize the fields in my filters and search results?"

For collections, you may be interested in finding out the number of catalog records added by users in 2022. If you want to include all records entered in 2022, you will want to add the "Entered" field to the list of available filter fields for All Catalogs. Once this field is added, go to the All Catalogs Query screen and follow these steps:

If you wish to print or export these results, open the Options accordion, select the fields you wish to include, then click "Apply". Click "Export to CSV" or click "Print" and select one of the reports.

For development, you will likely want to know the total amount of donations received in a year. There are a few ways to do this including the built-in report, Donations, Dues, and In-Kind Gifts Summary. To run this report, click on "Reports" in the Navigation Bar, then click on the report name. Enter the date range, select "Donations", and click "Preview".

You can also get a list of all donations received in a year from Pledges & Receipts by following these steps:

You can export or print the list of donations. To change which fields appear in the export file or on the printed list, open the "Options" accordion, select the fields to include, and click "Apply".

These examples both show a simple filter based on a date range, however you may want to filter on additional data if you looking for records added to a specific Collection or donations made to a specific Fund. For information on creating more complex filter statements, read our Knowledge Base article, "How do I search a specific field(s) to find all records with that data?"

Curious about upgrading to PastPerfect Web Edition? We invite you to register for our hour-long, on-demand or live webinars that walk through the collections and contacts capabilities of our cloud-based software. Register for either webinar here: https://museumsoftware.com/demo.html.

After the webinar, if you think Web Edition is the right choice for your organization, contact the team at webedition@museumsoftware.com to get started on the next steps.

We are asking each of our staff to choose a favorite item from one of the many online collections. This artifact was selected from the online collection of the Center for Sacramento History by Jennessa because:

"Like many children, I grew up on the wit, warmth, and wisdom of Sesame Street. Each of their characters (both human and muppet) have influenced a lot of how I look at life. This picture of Snuffy takes me back to those childhood memories and brings a smile to my face."