Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Exploring RootsMagic 6 - Post 1

I read the press release about the latest RootsMagic version 6 (see http://www.geneapress.com/2012/11/rootsmagic-6-released.html) and downloaded the program last night, paid for it online, and installed the registration key (when you open up the Essentials program, a box will pop up with 3 options.  One of those options is to "Unlock Full Registered Version").


The What's New in RootsMagic 6 page (http://www.rootsmagic.com/RootsMagic/WhatsNew.aspx) provides a summary of the new features, including:

*  Publish Online -- Publish your family information to My.RootsMagic.com; Dynamic sites with pedigree, family and individual views for each person; Can include notes, sources, and media for each person

*  Enhanced Timeline View -- Shows a full timeline of the current person's events and those of their parents, siblings, spouses, and children; Shows a graphical timeline of the person's events; Edit events, names, directly from the timeline view (without having to open the edit screen)

*  CountyCheck Explorer -- Lets you look up counties and states (US, Canada, UK, Australia) to view information about them; Access the FamilySearch Wiki page for counties and states; Access an interactive state map showing historical county boundaries

*  WebTags -- Attach links to websites to any person, source, citation, place, or research log item; Instantly jump to a web page tagged to a record; Print a list of WebTags you have added to your database

*  Find Everywhere -- Find every record containing text you enter; Find people, families, events, notes, sources, places, to-do items, research logs, media items, and more; Edit any found record directly from the results screen

*  Enhanced searching and selecting -- Search for people by the number of spouses, children, parents, or siblings that they have; Select people based on genetic lines (Y-STR and Mitochondrial)

*  Enhanced WebSearch -- Create a WebTag directly from your search results; Optionally use an external browser for search results

*  Enhanced Place List -- View place detail information directly from the place list; Edit place detail notes, media, etc. directly from the place list

All of that sound pretty good to me...but did the basic functions and screens change much?  Other than adding buttons to different windows and items to the different menu lists, I don't see much difference.  The basic data entry, data editing, source citing, media attaching/tagging, report writing, chart making, etc. are essentially the same.

I was curious about the Enhanced Timeline View, so I looked at that:



There are three buttons under the View menu bar:  "Add a fact," "Delete fact" and "Options."

From this menu, I can add a fact without going to the "Edit P{erson" menu - I clicked on the "Add a fact" button:


I could choose any Fact from the list, click the "Select" button and add content - a Fact panel opens on the right-side of the screen to add the Fact content.

Facts on the list can be deleted by highlighting the selected Fact and clicking on the "Delete fact" button.

The Timeline View "Options" button opens a list from which the user can check or uncheck different presentation options:


The Enhanced Timeline View works well as far as I can see.  Unfortunately, I deleted my RootsMagic 5 program as part of the installation procedure, so I can't do a side-by-side comparison of the enhancements.

More to come - I'm still working with it.  I'm intrigued by the My RootsMagic publication option and will look at it soon.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/11/exploring-rootsmagic-6-post-1.html

Copyright (c) 2012 - Randall J. Seaver

1 comment:

Yvette Hoitink said...

I've just upgraded to RootsMagic 6 and was very disappointed that a bug that has been bugging me still has not been fixed.

I have a whole list of Evidence Explained! quality sample citations in Word. When I add a source in RootsMagic, I use the FreeForm and then copy-paste the reference footnote from Word. But when I do that, some spaces aren't copied and words get glued together that should not be. Does anyone else have this problem, or better yet, a solution?