Thursday, February 19, 2015

Dear Randy: How Can I Make a Calendar in Family Tree Maker 2014?

My colleague Sondra sent me a Dear Randy note this morning, wanting to do the challenge in Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Your Ancestors or Cousins Born on Your Birth Date (posted 7 February 2015) using Family Tree Maker 2014.

After updating my Family Tree Maker 2014 program this morning (to Version 1345), which took some time to convert the database (why is this the only software program that requires this after a major release?), I figured it out:

1)  From any screen, select the "Publish" Workspace:



2)  Choose "Other" from the "Publication Types" in the left margin.  The "Calendar Report" is listed in the center panel:


3)  I clicked on the "Calendar Report" and it opened.  There are icons at the top of the right-hand panel.  I clicked on the "Calendar Options" icon and was able to check "Births" and uncheck "Marriages" and Deaths.  I also looked critically at the other options too:



4)  After clicking "OK" there were choices in the right-hand panel for:

*  Immediate Family
*  Extended Family
*  All Individuals
*  Selected Individuals

I selected "Selected Individuals" and the "Filter Individuals" screen opened.  I wanted all of my Ancestors, so I clicked on the "Ancestors >" button and the "Ancestors" screen opened.  I chose 15 generations of ancestors to include, "Include all parents" and "Include all spouses" plus "Include ancestors descendants" with 1 generation to get siblings of my ancestors.


I clicked "OK" and saw the persons in my database that satisfied the Filter criteria:


There were 2641 in my database.

5)  I clicked "OK" on the screen above, and the Calendar was created - it took several seconds.  There are 12 months in the calendar, with persons names on their birth date with their ages in 2015:


As you can see, none of my ancestors or their siblings have their birthday on my birthday, 23 October.

6)  If I want to "Print" the Calendar, I can click on the "Print" button at the top right of the page above.  If I want to "Share" the Calendar, in PDF, RTF or CSV format, I can click on the "Share" button on the top right of the page above.  I selected "Export to PDF" and opened it in my PDF reader:



7)  I did a Calendar for 4 generations of Ancestors and 7 generations of descendants of Ancestors, and had 556 selected persons.  That provided a good calendar with births, marriages and deaths for my close relations - third cousins and closer - pretty much what I would want for a calendar to save and use.  The background colors are blue for births, pink for marriages, and gray for deaths:


I even found the cousin who has my birth date!

8)  This works well, but you have to pay attention to the Calendar Options.  I had several false starts and using the Calendar Options made it all make sense.

You also should do Births, Marriages and Deaths separately if you select a lot of persons.  The Births and Deaths calendar date space lists only 5-7 persons, and the Marriages calendar date lists only 3 marriages, and they do it alphabetically.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/02/dear-randy-how-can-i-make-calendar-in.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver


2 comments:

Linda Stufflebean said...

Randy, Thank you for all the techie posts that you do. I wanted to look at a calendar, too, and usually use FTM, but didn't know how to do that. I also have RootsMagic and when I looked on line for the answer there, your post came up. Love it!

JS said...

Family Tree Maker 2014 includes the maiden name and married name in the calendar. How can I remove the maiden name to just have the married name on the calendar. Previous years of Family Tree Maker did not do this?? Please help!! Other than that my whole family loves the calendar!!