Thursday, December 8, 2011

Exploring Family Tree Maker 2012 - Post 28: Creating an Undocumented Facts Report

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See all posts in this series at Exploring Family Tree Maker 2012 Compendium.

One of the new features in Family Tree Maker 2012 (added in the Patch released this week) is the Undocumented Facts Report.  I wanted to see how it worked and what the resulting report would look like.  The description of this report is:

"The Undocumented Facts Report lists all of the facts in your tree for which you do not have information."

In the "People" workspace with William Knapp (1775-1856) on my screen, I clicked on the "Publish" workspace button and selected "Source Reports" and highlighted the "Undocumented Facts" report:


I selected the "Create Report" button (I could have double-clicked the report icon also) and a report for William Knapp's family was created.  The report offers three options for "Individuals to Include" in the report:

*  Immediate family
*  All individuals
*  Selected individuals

I wanted to run a report for the descendants of William Knapp, so I checked the "Selected individuals" box, typed "Knapp, William" into the search box, picked the right one, and clicked on "Descendants" and 151 persons were added to the selected group:


The resulting report for Descendants of William Knapp was only 18 pages long, and was created in less than ten seconds.  Yikes!


On a whim, I selected the entire database, and a report that was 2,785 pages long was created after more than ten minutes.  That will keep me busy for awhile, eh?  More yikes!


I tried to save that report as an RTF file, and stopped the program after it tried to do it over a twenty minute period. 

The Undocumented Facts Report finds every Fact for which there is no source provided.  It lists the persons alphabetically by last name, first name.  That includes the Person ID number, the FamilySearch Family Tree number, the Sex, Name, AKA Name, Alternate Facts, and all other Facts.  Note: in my database, I have not provided sources for names, sex, or Person ID, or for personal knowledge items like occupations and residences.

It would be nice if the user could select the Fact types to be reported - that would reduce the report size considerably. 

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