Have you ever been entering a place and wished you knew what county, province, state or country the place was in?  RootsMagic 4 now provides a worldwide place database with 3.5 million places in it.  Just pop up the place search and enter what you know about the place and RootsMagic will display matching places.  Select a place and click OK and RootsMagic will paste the fully standardized place into the place field for you.

But what if you don’t want a full “standardized” place (like if you have an historical place name)?  When you edit a place from the master place list, you can enter the place 1) the way you want it normally displayed, 2) as a standardized place, and 3) as an abbreviated version of the place.  Of course the standardized and abbreviated places are both optional.

I’m guessing a lot of you noticed the “GeoCode” button on the Edit Place screen above.  Clicking that button in RootsMagic 4 will geocode your place for you.  Geocode just means that RootsMagic will check its 3.5 million place name database to find a match for your place, and insert the latitude, longitude, and standardized place name for you.  Now of course we won’t make you geocode your database one place at a time.  RootsMagic 4 can also geocode your entire database, and let you hand pick the places that are ambiguous.

And finally, RootsMagic 4 offers a gazetteer on the tools menu to look up any place in the world.

We know how much current RootsMagic users like the free PlaceFinder program we’ve included all these years.  Think of the Gazetteer as a world-wide PlaceFinder on steroids.  Like the Place Search above, just type in as much of the place as you know and click Search.  The Gazetteer will show you all matches, and will even let you view an online map of any of those matching places (you need to be online to view the online map of course).

Think we’re done with places?  You’ll need to check out my next blog entry to find out.

Have you ever wanted to tweak the sentence for a single fact without having to change the global sentence template for that fact type?  RootsMagic 4 now lets you customize the sentence for any fact in your database.  If you are happy with the default sentence for your fact, you don’t have to do anything.  Otherwise click “Customize sentence” and do your own thing.

Here’s the screen where you will customize your sentence.

Just modify the sentence template for this one instance, or just type a sentence directly.  It doesn’t matter whether you change the sentence to:

[person] was buried with full military honors [date] [place].

or

John Doe was buried with full military honors on January 15, 1943 in Avon, Iowa.

Using the fields like [person], [date], and [place] means that the sentence for that fact will still update if the person’s info changes.

And speaking of fields (this is where readers who don’t bother changing sentence templates might want to bail out <g>)…

We have completely rewritten the sentence template language.  While there isn’t nearly enough time or room in this blog to go into detail about all the enhancements available when creating sentence templates, let me just say you can now create sentences which contain:

1. conditional parts which can change based on various criteria (like sex, whether the data exists, etc)
2. modifiers for fields (like [date:year] or [place:reverse]
3. and something else I’ll talk about in a future entry (tease)

I just looked at the remaining sneak previews, and I guarantee you won’t want to miss any of them.  I’ve been having fun showing all these features so far, but like I said early on, I’ve been saving the best for last.  There are still at least a dozen major features coming (we weren’t kidding about this being the biggest upgrade in our 22 year history).  Keep sharing this blog with your family and friends, and I promise you won’t be disappointed.

I keep getting busy programming and forget to blog about all the great stuff coming in version 4, so I’m going to skip the rest of the little things and start sneak previewing the bigger stuff. I’ll leave the little stuff for you to find on your own when we release version 4 before the end of the year (there… there’s your first hint about the release date).

Back in a previous post, several people wondered what that button (1) on the left side of the screen was for. Of course I didn’t tell, which led to a lot of rampant guessing and speculation. So let’s put an end to the speculation. If you click on the image below you’ll see RootsMagic 4’s new collapsible side bar. Click the button to access the side bar, and again if you want it hidden. The side bar is available regardless of which main view you are using.

The side bar has four (count’em) 4 tabs. The Index tab shown above is a list of the people in your database. You have incremental search and alternate name support, and if you are using color coding it will show as well. Select a person from the index list and RootsMagic will select that person in the current view (pedigree, family, etc).

Tab 2 is the family tab which will show you all the immediate family members (spouses, kids, parents, and siblings) of the person selected on the main screen. You can select any of those family members and click the Go button to switch to that person.

Tab 3 is the bookmark tab. Just press Ctrl+B or click the “Add bookmark” button to add the current person to the bookmark list.

And tab 4 is the history tab. Every time you edit a person, RootsMagic will automatically add that person to the history tab. Need to get back to someone you edited half an hour ago? This is where you’ll find them.

Oh, and just to make sure you can’t stop speculating, I wanted to point out (if you hadn’t noticed already), that there is another blurred tab that has magically appeared on the main screen. Where do those things keep coming from? Guess you’ll just have to keep reading the blog.

OK, so here’s a feature we have gotten a lot of requests for, and in RootsMagic 4 we’re going to deliver it.

If you have ever added alternate names for people in your database, you can now have those alternate names appear in lists of people (like the RootsMagic Explorer). If you think you might get confused having a person appear under their multiple names in the lists, just unmark the “Show alternate names” checkbox and it will only list each person once under their primary name.

Clicking on an alternate name in the list will take you to the same place that clicking on the primary name would. It’s just that you can now find people by all those other names they may have been known as during their lifetime.

Stay tuned for more cool stuff. And thanks for telling your friends and families to check out what will be our biggest upgrade ever.

Today’s sneak preview is going to be short and sweet (and no screen shot on top of that).  But don’t worry, we still have plenty of new screen shots left to go.

While website creation in RootsMagic 4 is very similar to that in version 3, there is one big difference.  RootsMagic 4 uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) when creating a website.  If you don’t create websites, or don’t know what CSS is, you probably won’t find this very exciting.

However, if you have ever had to modify fonts, colors or other settings in a RootsMagic generated website, I can hear you saying “yes” all the way from here.  No more having to modify hundreds of individual html files.  Just edit the single .CSS file and all your pages will use the modified styles.

So for all you html’ers, this one’s for you.  For everyone else, we’ll be right back with more cool screenshots and features.

Media Album

An old adage says that a picture is worth a thousand words. So here are 3000 words worth of pictures about RootsMagic 4’s new multimedia features. As in previous versions of RootsMagic, you can add pictures or other media to people, families, sources, citations, events, or places. Here’s what the new Media Album looks like (click the image if you want to see it without squinting):

The first thing long time RootsMagic users will notice is that you aren’t limited to viewing 6 pictures at a time for a person. Not only can you scroll to view all the pictures for a person, you can also adjust the size of the thumbnails by simply (1) dragging the slider at the bottom of the album.

If you’ve ever added a family picture to each member of the family, and had to re-enter that nice detailed description over and over, you’ll love the new RootsMagic 4 Media Gallery. Every time you add a picture to a person (or other item) RootsMagic 4 keeps track of the photo so that you can re-use the same picture along with its caption, description, and other information. When adding a new picture to a person, just click “Add from gallery” (2) to re-use an existing media item.

Selecting a media item will display its details (caption, description, file name, etc) in the (3) live edit panel.

Media Gallery

If you want to see all the pictures you have added, just bring up the master Media Gallery.

Not only can you see all your media, but you can also click the “Show usage” button to get a list of every place in your file that the highlighted media is referenced.

I’m on my way to Indianapolis for my third conference in 3 weeks (which I will attempt to pass off as my excuse for not spilling the beans as quickly as I would like). I will try to pick up the pace a bit. We still have a ton of cool new features to cover.

By the way, if you have a friend you’ve been trying to convert to RootsMagic, let them know about our blog. We’ll help you out with that <g>.

People? Mark Tucker’s guess sure sounded a lot more exciting.

But even if the People tab can’t automatically do all your genealogy for you, it will help you quickly and easily analyze your data in ways that used to require tedious creating and printing custom reports.

So let’s take a look at this People page. Click on the screen shot below so you can actually see what it looks like.

At first glance the People page looks like just another list. There are a couple of differences though, the first being the “Customize this view” button. When you click the Customize button RootsMagic will let you select which columns you want to display in the list.

Select the column you want in the left list, then click the “Add to view” button (you can also just double click on a field to move it over). You can add up to 50 columns to the view, and you can change them anytime you want. Once you have selected the columns you want, just drag and drop them into the order you want them in the view.

Then comes the fun part. Any column you add to the People view is fully sortable. Want to see your people grouped by birth place? Just click the birth place header and your wish is RootsMagic’s command. Want to see everyone in death date order? Just click the death date column (just make sure you added that column first). Here’s an example of the People view sorted by birth place.

Oh, and if you do add 50 columns, RootsMagic will let you scroll to see them all (obviously), and will even keep the person’s name (in the first column) frozen on the screen so you don’t lose track of what information belongs to who.

Well, back to programming. I’ve been hearing rumors that some users want us to get this released.

Another quicky while I’m at the BYU genealogy conference.

We all know how important it is to add sources for the information we enter. When adding a source in RootsMagic, we’ve always been able to enter the “quality” of the citation. But it has been limited to “primary”, “secondary”, “questionable”, and “unreliable”. Until now.

As you can see, RootsMagic 4 now follows approved standards for evidence analysis in an easy to understand format.

To learn more about evaluating your genealogy sources, visit:

http://www.bcgcertification.org/skillbuilders/skbld085.html

And our friend Mark Tucker over at ThinkGenealogy.com has put together a Genealogy Research Map that covers the full research process (including assessing the quality of a citation). You can download it for free from:

http://www.thinkgenealogy.com/2008/07/31/genealogy-research-process-map-version-2/

This isn’t the only new source enhancement coming in RootsMagic, but we’re saving the best for later. Stay tuned.

I am at the BYU Family History Conference all week. But here’s a quicky for you.

If you’ve done much merging, you know that most of your time is spent staring at the screen comparing names, dates, and places. In RootsMagic 4 it is color to the rescue…

If you noticed all the green on the two possible duplicates on this merge screen, you may have realized that green means the fields match on the two records. So if you see a bunch of green, it means to don’t have to spend as much time comparing every field of the two records before making a decision whether to merge them. Now take a look at this one…

These possible duplicates have some yellow fields and a red field. Yellow indicates that the fields are close but not exactly the same, and red indicates they aren’t the same at all. So if you are seeing red, it means don’t waste your time comparing all those fields.

There are a several other areas where RootsMagic 4 uses colors like this, but we’ll let you have the fun of discovering those for yourself.

We’ve made a few minor enhancements to working with files (aside from the new file extension that Jon mentioned in a comment to an earlier post… we’ll talk about what that means in a future post).

Creating a New File

We’ve created a new “New File” form to simplify creating a new database and getting started.

To create a new database just type in a file name and click OK, and RootsMagic will create the new database in the default folder you have selected. The “New File” form also gives you a couple of options for what to do after the new file has been created.

Opening a File

One of the most common tech support issues we get is from users who can’t find a file they created. Earlier versions of RootsMagic have had a “Search for files” command, but it was a separate command and not really available when you actually needed it. In RootsMagic 4 we bring the “Search for files” feature front and center. For example, when you choose to open an existing database (File > Open from the menu), you’ll see this screen.

Hopefully it is self-explanatory (or if not, please let us know what wording *would* be). So whether you know where all your files are, or are less than comfortable with the Windows file dialog, we’ve got you covered.

Searching for Files

If you select “Search for a file” from the form above, RootsMagic will immediately open this screen and begin searching. You can pause the search any time and select any file found up to that point and open it directly from the search results.

This search screen is also available from other places in RootsMagic 4, like when you are importing data from another program, or searching for a backup to restore.

And of course it is still available directly from the menu.

Rename Can Now Move

Yes, the File > Rename command has put on its dancing shoes. In earlier versions of RootsMagic the Rename command simply changed the name of the database you were working on. The database had a new name but stayed in the same folder.

In RootsMagic 4 you can still do a simple file renaming, but now you can also choose a new folder and have RootsMagic move the database to that new folder. For those of you who have tried to move a RootsMagic database before, you know you like this feature.

Hopefully you aren’t getting bored by these sneak peeks (see, I spelled it right this time) at some of the fun little things we have added in RootsMagic 4. Hang in there though. The big stuff is just around the corner.