Notes report

[Keith Wilson]

Originally posted by jillaine smith

In the two other (Windows-based) programs that I have played with, neither has been able to generate a report or narrative that includes the NOTES field for all people in the database who have one. And from what I can tell so far, iFamily doesn't have this feature either, but since its author is so accessible, I thought I would ask about this and find out why on earth it's so hard to generate.

Here's what I'm wanting to do.

I'm at the point in my own research that I'm predominantly focused on cleaning things up. Making sources consistently formatted. Making sure facts are, in fact, sourced.

I'm also cleaning up my NOTES. Over the years, I've used my NOTES fields to dump, well, my notes. As I'd find various sources, I'd copy them into Notes. I'd write my theories, I'd write other people's theories. I'd include work I still needed to do-- like a check list.

Now I'm just trying to get the text inside of NOTES into an easier-to-read format, the more or less follows a consistent format.

But I need a way to review all my notes for everyone in the database.
In the other windows programs, I tried to create a custom report that would look like this:

First Name, Last Name
Birth Date
Death Date
NOTES [for our purposes here, these would be the notes for an individual]

[page break]
Repeat from beginning

And I want to be able to say, include all people where NOTES is not empty.

I want a similar report for Marriage notes:

Husband first/last
Wife first/last
Marriage date:
Marriage NOTES:

While I could create custom reports in both FTM and RootsMagic, I could not include the NOTES field. The only way I could do it would be one person at a time. I didn't want that. I wanted a single text file output that I could go through and clean up, then paste things back into my database.

Is there anyway to do something like this with iFamily?
I also see that iFamily doesn't have a custom report feature. At least that I can find.
Any plans for this in a future upgrade?

-- Jillaine
p.s. apologies: by the time I reached the end of this, I realized that I should probably put this in the other discussion forum.

[Keith Wilson]

Hi Jillaine,

I do hope you are not thinking of printing hundreds (or thousands) of sheets of paper - it may be relatively cool where you come from but it's getting awful hot down here.

Anyway, to start with I suggest that you try the People Index.

• The People Index allows you to enter various search criteria.
• You can drag the horizontal separator bar to see more of the person's information (report) area.
• You can press the Notes button to edit Notes, Comments, Birth Notes and Death Notes.

So that should get a large part of the job done - and it's paperless.

Are there any enhancements that you would like in the People Index to complete the whole job?

BTW: In iFamily the correct place for research comments and jottings is in the Person's Comments field - the Person's Notes field should really only contain what is valid enough to publish for others to see.

Keith

[Keith Wilson]

Originally posted by jillaine smith

Keith, I'll play around with the People index and see if I can get what I'm looking for. No, I don't want to print this on paper I just want it in one file that I can open and work on in a word processor.

-- Jillaine
who recycles, composts, grows an organic garden, commutes by public transportation and does a variety of other things to attempt to counter balance our horrendous impact on the beloved planet