Saturday, August 29, 2009

RootsMagic vs. Legacy - Part II

This post will probably not be as long as Part I, but I just have to lament on here for a moment.

At first, I was very excited that I could share a child's birth event in RootsMagic with the parents. It would then show up in the parent's fact list in the edit person screen with the parent's age at the time of the child's birth. Well, I think I may have figured out one major area where Legacy excels over RootsMagic. REPORTING!!! There were very few options that I could change when generating a family group sheet. Every fact/event was added to the family group sheet. I like my family group sheets to be simple and contain only birth, marriage, death, and burial info for each person. I don't like every single event showing up. How does sharing a child's birth play into this? Well, on my parents' family group sheet, my birth is showing up under my mom's name, along with her birth and the births of my siblings. I only want her birth to show up. I tried going into her edit person screen and making my birth a private event, but this made it a private event for me too. Making it private doesn't allow it to show up anywhere on the family group sheet, even under my name. I looked for ways to exclude certain events, but the only way was to make an event private. Legacy is much more flexible about choosing what events to put in a family group sheet. Maybe I will have to use RootsMagic as my working database and Legacy as my reporting database.

UPDATE: I think I figured something out in RootsMagic. By going to the Fact Type List, I can choose a fact type and then edit it's properties. One of the items to check is Include in Family Group Sheets. This solves most of my problem. The only problem is that I can't tell a birth to not show up in family group sheets. But I can create an event called "Birth of child" and tell this not to show up in family group sheets. At least I can share this event between the two parents because otherwise, it defeats some of my excitement about sharing.

1 comment:

  1. Hmmm...that is a problem. I never thought to look in my reports. Have you talked to anybody about it...like Geoff? I've found that posting over in the RM4 forum is a great tool. The people are very friendly over there, especially with my problems. Good luck!

    ReplyDelete