Saturday, March 28, 2009

Working in RootsMagic 4 - Post 2: Editing Person Data

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I downloaded the free RootsMagic 4 beta release in early March, and easily uploaded my Family Tree Maker file to it. In this series, I'm looking at different features of RootsMagic 4. I'm not doing a comprehensive review, just looking at features important to me. Previous posts in this series include:

* Working in RootsMagic 4 - Post 1: Navigation

Note that RootsMagic 4 can import a database from the earlier RootsMagic 1-3, Family Origins, Family Tree Maker, Legacy, Personal Ancestral File and GEDCOM formats.

Using my uploaded GEDCOM file, I chose my great-grandfather, Frank Walton Seaver to demonstrate how to edit information about a person. Here is the "Family" View:


Frank Seaver is highlighted in blue. Double-clicking on him, the "Edit Person" screen opens:



The Name field is highlighted, and the Person information on the right of the box can be changed. The user can add a nickname, a prefix, a suffix or check the "living" box. Below this edit area are buttons for Note, Sources, Media, Address and To-Do. General notes for the person are associated with the person's name. There is a mini-word processor capability in the Note area - the user can do some formatting by Cut, copy, Paste, Bold, Italics, Underline, Find, Replace, Spell Check, Thesaurus and Character Map. This is pretty neat.

You can see on the screen above that there are green check marks in the Source column for the birth, marriage and death facts. The user can add notes and media for these facts also.

I highlighted the Marriage fact and I could edit the Marriage information if I chose:



On the screen above, I clicked on the "Sources" button and saw:

My source is a place-holder at this point. I need to edit it using the Source Citation tools provided in RootsMagic 4. I will show this operation in a future post.

When all the editing of a Person's information is complete, the user clicks on the "Close" button and is back to the "Family" View screen (or whatever screen the user was on when s/he double-clicked the person in the first place).

This operation is very easy and intuitive to someone with some experience in genealogy software. The icons used for Note, Sources and Media are easy to get used to.

In the next post, I will try to add a child to this family to demonstrate the process.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Randy,

RootsMagic imports Family Tree Maker classic, but not New Family Tree Maker.

I've looked at the GEDCOM capabilities of RootsMagic 4 and found it to be blazing fast,
but also noticed that it does not import ANSEL GEDCOM files correctly. Bruce has confirmed this problem and it is going to be fixed. RootsMagic 4 does support UTF-8 GEDCOM.

- Tamura

Abba-Dad said...

Two little tips:

1. You can click on the green check marks or the empty squares to edit notes, sources and images.

2. The 'Memorize' & 'Paste' functions are very useful.

If you get a chance, take a look at opening two GEDCOM file and copying people from one to the other with a simple drag-drop.

Cousin Russ said...

-Tamara,

What is the difference between Family Tree Maker Classic and Family Tree Maker. There is One Genealogy Program called Family Tree Maker. What is the Classic that you mention?

Thank you,

Russ