Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Working in RootsMagic 4 - Post 4B: Creating a Pedigree Chart

In my last post, I lamented (complained?) that I wanted to put colors on the names in the pedigree chart. Reader Rudolph J. gave me a clue how to do that - activate Tools > Color Code People, then select a color and check the Ancestors of current person box. I picked Red!

Here is the result - the six-generation (without cascading sheets) with the "Ancestor of current person" being myself:


Then I read Rudolph's comment again, and found that I could color code groups of people with different colors. I chose my four grandparents to have different colors, and came up with my own pedigree chart:



He noted that the color coding shows up in the Pedigree, Family and Descendant and People Views, and in the Name Index on the left.

Thank you to Chris for the hint and the help. There are so very many options in this program that I haven't explored yet. I did find the Maps finally - I'll show some of that in a later post.

I bought the program yesterday ahead of the 1 April 2009 deadline, and got the $10 discount for users of other genealogy software. They send a registration key via email. They suggested a way to use the registration key before 1 April, and I tried it, but it didn't work for some reason. On 1 April, the trial version will ask for the registration key, I think. We'll see!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've just tweeted the solution Bruce gave me a few days ago:

#genealogy Entering new RootsMagic key: Press Ctrl+Shift+U, choose Reset Registration Info, restart RM to enter key.

It worked for me.

Eileen said...

I have very impressed by RootsMagic 4 so I purchased it last week. I did an update from within the program but when I tried the CTRL+SHIFT+U nothing happened. I had to go to the rootsmagic website and download the current full copy of the software, install it and then the CTRL+SHIFT+U worked.

Now if they could just get it to import from FTM 2009, it would be perfect.