Hi Jose,
Nobody is forcing you to use the Events. You can
just do your own thing in the General Notes and
you could make the Research Notes and the Medical
Notes anything you want as well. You can change their headers in Reports.
There are advantages in using Events for like
information as you can search on the Event and
find it all. You can also source information more
precisely than you can with sourcing Notes in
Legacy. There is also a lot of flexibility in
Legacy to use the Event fields to suit yourself
as you can edit the Event Sentence Definitions.
The default ones are simply a guide as to what can be done.
Genealogy software has moved beyond the basics of
birth, death and marriage events and general
notes because of interaction between software
programmers and users - but you can ignore all
the other fields if you want to or until you find them useful.
There is a lot of pressure on programmers to
provide reports that require little or no
intervention by the writer beyond entering the
data into the database. Some want automatic ways
even when they haven't followed the program norms of data entry.
Because information stuck in a database isn't
particularly useful unless you can get it out of
the database in readable formats, it is important
to try out various reports/web pages as you go.
There's little point putting it into a database
if you then have to start from scratch to write your book.
Cathy
At 06:40 AM 24/07/2007, you wrote:
Hi Susan
Thanks for your clear and clever advice, it
seems to go along with my feelings and Ill take
it as a good one. Allow me to use it as a
challenge to Legacy (or other application)
users. Im an historian not a genealogist (no
value judgment on this) and an amateur on
genealogy matters. I therefore call for experts
indulgence for the following reasoning.
Genealogy softwares seem to me to be subjugated
to output formatting needs. Every single piece
of information must be entered in a particular
field (sometimes several clicks afar) with the
only goal to construct a grammatically correct
phrase in the Reports options. Any piece of
information that doesnt exactly fits the
predefined format requires a tricky and
cumbersome solution like the one you
suggest. As a newby, I wonder why the softwares
doesnt focus on the obvious standard fields
(birth, marriage, death, etc.) so that the
application produces the core of the report and
let the genealogists write their own additional
text, based on the multiple tags and Notes
fields. Do they think genealogists cant write
by themselves? Do they think that genealogists
only care about descendant narrative reports
or alike, and not about family history, kinship
or social relationships (as you recall) and all
the comments you could deduce analysing your
data? As for my experience in other areas,
databases are a repository of information you
can use, analyse and interpret, not an automatic way of writing stories.
Agreeing or not, I think users should let the
software producers to know their feelings about
the (seems to me) complication of ingesting data
just for the purpose of printing reports.
Just a tip. ;-)
José Mariz
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