Mass-adding identical information

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Keith Wilson
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Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 2:12 pm

Mass-adding identical information

Post by Keith Wilson » Sun Nov 11, 2007 8:48 pm

Originally posted by Kirkman

I'm wondering if there's some way to make it easy to mass-add a piece of information to multiple people. For instance, I am inputting a bunch of family members from a printed family tree prepared by a relative. It would be nice to have some way to select all of them and add a source citation.

Or maybe in a generation of a family all the kids were born in the same city. It would be nice to select all of them and have some way to add the city in one step.

What would be ideal is something like in iTunes, where you can select multiple songs, click apple-I (get info), and then edit the ID3 tags of all the songs as a group.

It would be cool to be able to select multiple people (in a view like the Descendants pane) and edit them as a group like in iTunes.

Or, if this isn't easily do-able, maybe just the ability for a user to choose which columns he can see in the various panes. Like maybe I'm in the Descendants pane and I choose to add a column for Death date or Sources or something, so that I can quickly go through the list and add whatever info I need to in those columns.

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Keith Wilson
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Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 2:12 pm

Mass-adding identical information

Post by Keith Wilson » Sun Nov 11, 2007 10:33 pm

Hi Josh

Thanks for the feedback I will add your request to the iFamily ToDo list. In my own (development) version of iFamily I have some of these features but they are turned off in the released version.

I will answer your questions one at a time, but it is within the context of " batch editing of a family tree database is easy to do but very hard to manually undo if you make a mistake" - so it may be quite dangerous unless it in includes annoying popups for each change to each person like " are you sure that you want to do that?"
I'm wondering if there's some way to make it easy to mass-add a piece of information to multiple people. For instance, I am inputting a bunch of family members from a printed family tree prepared by a relative. It would be nice to have some way to select all of them and add a source citation.
You can set a source to be the Active Source and then right click on each person and add a reference to the Active Source. In the source citation dialog you can enter the page reference in the source for that particular person.

Alternatively you can have the Active Source selected while you add new people and iFamily will automatically prompt you for the page ref to the active source.
Or maybe in a generation of a family all the kids were born in the same city. It would be nice to select all of them and have some way to add the city in one step. What would be ideal is something like in iTunes, where you can select multiple songs, click apple-I (get info), and then edit the ID3 tags of all the songs as a group.
The drop down box for the place name is fairly slick and all you have to do is to enter the first few characters and it will filter the drop down list of place names accordingly.

Alternatively you could cut and paste the place name in the Family pane, one at a time - it is quickest to paste using Cmd+V.
It would be cool to be able to select multiple people (in a view like the Descendants pane) and edit them as a group like in iTunes.

Or, if this isn't easily to do-able, maybe just the ability for a user to choose which columns he can see in the various panes. Like maybe I'm in the Descendants pane and I choose to add a column for Death date or Sources or something, so that I can quickly go through the list and add whatever info I need to in those columns.
Oh yes, it is all very easily doable, and in the Sources Add/Edit dialog there is already the capability to to do multiple edits at once. The problem is to make sure that mistakes, and they may be large mistakes, are easily undoable.

Keith

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