Monday, September 16, 2013

First Look at Family Tree Maker 2014 - Post 4: Finding and Replacing Information

Family Tree Maker announced their impending release of Family Tree Maker 2014 genealogy software three weeks ago - I covered it in Family Tree Maker 2014 Software Announced - 30% Discount (or more) (posted 26 August 2013).  

I ordered it and downloaded it, and imported a recent GEDCOM file created in RootsMagic 6.  


As I noted in First Look at Family Tree Maker 2014 - Mea Culpa! Looking Again at the Person Migration Map in the Places Workspace, the Migration Map only works if a user has "resolved" the place names involved.  

Since all of my place names in my RootsMagic file and the GEDCOM file used "United States," I have to change those to "USA" to meet the Family Tree Maker 2014 standard place names.  

In a comment on my post Follow-Up Friday - Helpful and Interesting Reader Comments, Elizabeth H. said:

"There is a Find and Replace function in Family Tree Maker. Under Edit, one of the choices is "Find and Replace." When you select this, it gives you the option of which items to search in. You can select from Facts, Notes, Sources, Media, Tasks, Places. (But I would suggest choosing one, depending on what you're looking for.) You can try searching for United States, replacing with USA, and search only in Places. I tried it, but didn't have any, as that's one item I'm careful to correct to USA when United States comes over from a merged fact. Hope this is helpful."

That sounded very useful - thanks, Elizabeth!!

So, here's how I did it:

1)  I was in the "People" Workspace when I clicked the "Edit" menu link, and selected "Find and Replace" from the dropdown menu.  That opened the "Find and Replace" dialog box:  I put the term "United States" in the "Find" field, put "USA" in the "Replace with" field, clicked on the Option to find whole words only, and "Facts" only in the "Search in" list.


2)  I clicked on the "Find" button and the system started working:


This took some time - I estimate about 30 minutes - to find and replace 4500 instances of "United States" with "USA" in the "Fact" category:


3)  When it was completed, I clicked the "Replace All" button and after a short while (I estimate less than a minute), the index reformed.  I looked at the "Places" Workspace and saw:


Yep, all of the "United States" in the Place list are replaced by "USA."  

Note that I haven't Resolved all of the Place Names yet...Russ Worthington recommended against doing that using the Tools menu and picking "Resolve all place names."  He recommends doing them one place at a time.

I have many instances of farm villages in Norway, county names in Canada, and town names in the USA that are NOT in the standard place list on Family Tree Maker 2014 (and I'm guessing in Bing maps).  So I probably won't resolve all place names automatically.  

Note:  While I'm doing these posts on an occasional basis, Russ Wortthington is showing the new features of FTM 2014 in an organized way on his Family Tree Maker User blog.  Click on the "FTM 2014" page to see links to all of his posts about FTM 2014.

The URL for this post is:

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver

6 comments:

Crafting in Yoohooville said...

I owe Elizabeth H a huge debt of gratitude here - I've been trying to figure that out myself, Randy!

Thank you to you and Elizabeth for pointing this feature out and making my replacement go a lot faster!

Unknown said...

I don't use FTM primarily because I use a Mac. I use names and counties as they would have been appropriate to their day. Henrico, Virginia, USA, will be earlier: Henrico, Virginia Colony. Johnsonburg, Sussex County, New Jersey, rather than Warren, pre 1827. Augusta and Yohogania County rather than West Virginia counties, etc.
This educates me about the political history/divisions of the region as well as the families.
Your thoughts, sir?.

Cousin Russ said...

Charles,

FTMM-3 for the Mac is due out "before the end of the year".

FTM2012 and FTM2014 Allows us to Handle Historical Place names correctly. I have a blog post on that. I haven't blogged about FTMM-2 but I have it, so I am not sure if FTMM-2 (current version) handles historic names yet.

Russ

Elizabeth Handler said...

Randy, Thanks for the shout-out and I'm glad I've been able to help others who were not aware of this feature. Russ, I will have to explore FTMM-2 place names to see if it handles historic place names as you described for FTM2012. (My place names are kind of a mess, and I have put them on the back burner for now, but I know I need to tackle them soon.)

Cousin Russ said...

Eizabeth,

FTMM-2 has the Hieratical View for Historical Place Names. Works like FTM2012.

Russ

Ginger Smith said...

What a great feature! Thanks Randy and Elizabeth!