Comments on: RootsMagic 4 Unwrapped – The New Report Engine

By: Catherine

Catherine — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 05:34:20 +0000

The RM4 is terrific. What I am hoping to have in the future, is reports on DNA. My brother, Richard, belongs to the Hill Surname DNA Project, Group 26. We have in our Group, 6 Hill individuals. I am adding them all to a Hill Family genealogy based on DNA. Descendants of our Hill family will be coded in Red, and each of the others in a different color. We have not found a MRCA as yet, but would love to be able to make reports of the DNA results for comparison.

By: Bill

Bill — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:33:21 +0000

Looking forward to its release.
Will there be a way to enter Censuses by family??

Thanks
Bill

By: Gerald Clark

Gerald Clark — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:17:24 +0000

Will the new RootsMagic 4 be compatible with Vista Home Premium 64 bit?

By: John Calkins

John Calkins — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:10:50 +0000

I like what I am seeing and can’t wait to my my hands on it!!!

By the way, Since this seems to be a complete rewrite, how will RM4 work in importing files from other programs such as Ancestral Quest, Legacy, Family Tree Maker, etc?

By: John James

John James — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:32:33 +0000

Thanks for the reply Bruce, I didn’t mean to be negative, just wondering.

There is more than I could ever had hoped for in this release and that’s only the bits you have revealed.

Regarding my hope for being able to select from reports, the new Person screen and a few smart finds (hopefully storable finds) will fulfill what I am wanting to do for now, the new person screen might as well be a custom report of sorts.

Thanks for putting so much into this release, I like many others can hardly wait to get me hands on it.

John James

(Ireland) – presently Portugal

By: Michael Jones

Michael Jones — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:18:37 +0000

I agree with John in #12: his suggestion would be a great enhancement in a future release…

By: Bruce Buzbee

Bruce Buzbee — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:06:06 +0000

John, no, at least not in 4.0. But it is a feature we might be able to add to a future version with this report engine. We definitely couldn’t have done it in the old RootsMagic report engine.

By: John James

John James — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:08:57 +0000

Maybe I am missing something, but will you be able to click r double click an individual appearing on a report and go to the edit screen.

This is the only feature I have missed in FO/RM in comparison to FTM who had this functionality many years ago.

Fingers tightly crossed

By: Michael Booth

Michael Booth — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:47:30 +0000

Rita, you can read about Custom Reports in a previous blog entry here:

http://blog.rootsmagic.com/?p=88

By: Jerry Bryan

Jerry Bryan — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:26:08 +0000

Re: Mark’s #8: yes, I made note of the sentence structure improvement when it was announced. It’s a very nice feature and there were many wish list items to improve sentence structure. But there are many more report improvement requests in the official wish list than sentence structure.

I can work my way around most of my report issues by post-processing the RTF file created by RM. My two toughest issues that I can’t solve on my own are the following: 1) Descendant reports have no provision for listing children of spouses by another marriage. Those children are/were half brothers and sisters of people who are in the report, and were often raised in the same household as people who are in the report. 2) Outline type reports (outline, Henry, and D’Aboville) do not list family units together (father, mother, and children) except in the youngest generation in the report. Register type reports (register and modified register) solve the first problem, but the family unit printout looks terrible if one or more of the children never married or had children and also had lots of data.