Follow-Up Friday - Free-form sources in Family Tree Maker 2012

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In Follow-up Friday posts, I like to highlight comments from readers that pertain to previous blog posts that clarify or expand knowledge about issues raised in the original blog post.

Reader Jason emailed me, saying:

"I have been reading with great interest your blog postings regarding source citations in FTM 2012. I saw a mention of the fact that FTM 2012 has no true "free form" citation template. I don't think this is entirely true. Couldn't you just forgo the entire template / title system and simply type your full custom source citation into the "citation detail" box? This appears to work when trying to use Mills' EE citation formats. Am I missing something? What are your thoughts on this?"

My email response to Jason was:

"My thoughts are that you are correct!  I tried it, and that's exactly what I could do.  It is not [called] a 'free-form template' of course, just a 'Source Title' that works like a free-form template.

"The field in the template that the 'free-form source' you create appears in is 'Source Title.'  That field would have the author, title, and publication information for a book.  The page number in the book would go in the 'citation detail' field on the template.  Since almost all of mine came across through GEDCOM and were 'free-form' in RootsMagic, they all are in the 'Source Title' field.

"I don't see any drawbacks in using this free-form method in FTM 2012 - other than it's hard to find the source again when you want to use it later, as I wrote about today.  With 700 sources, I struggle to find the one I want.  But it's hard with a lot of sources created from templates too."

Jason also asked me:

"What about FTM2011 vs. 2012? Is there any functionality difference aside from the sync feature? Are most of the source and source citation functions the same as far as you know?"

My response was:

"The only real addition [of consequence] to FTM 2011 was the sync feature.  There were a few other [additions] listed, but they aren't overly significant IMHO."

Further comments:

I believe that the source creation and source citation features were not significantly changed from FTM 2011. 

The list of changes from FTM 2011 in FTM 2012 are in What’s new in Family Tree Maker 2012.

Thank you, Jason, for reading and for the comments, and helping me understand that there is a way to create "free-form" source citatins in FTM 2012.