Hello John, I am sure that after you get more familar with Legacy you will like it more and more. It seems to me that you need to spend a bit more time using Legacy. It is not Kith & Kin and cannot be expected to operate the same. The things you mentioned are not a problem for most of us who find it to be very intuitive and easy to learn. Lewis John Kendall wrote: > > Having resisted joining this debate for some time, I feel I will now join it > with, hopefully, some constructive comments. > > I have been using a rival product (Kith and Kin / Treedraw from Spansoft) > for several years now. It is shareware and very usable with good > functionality and good, free, support. But there was always some > functionality missing which I hoped would appear in the next version before > I paid the shareware fee (about £40). I came across the Legacy free version > 3 offer, through a newsgroup I think, took a look at it and immediately paid > the $19. The functionality is certainly good, however I also believe that > this is its weakness. > > The program looks as though it has evolved, rather than been developed. I > find it difficult and confusing to use, there are several ways to do many > things and each dialog is a jumble of buttons and tick boxes. Sometimes the > options are not where you would expect to see them. For example the recent > conversation about PDF, the button is at the bottom of the print preview > page, when it would more logically sit with the report output format radio > buttons (printer, html, rtf etc). There are several examples of > conversations on the user group list which arise because it is not intuitive > to use. > > I find the source input particularly confusing. When you want to put a > source for an event all the sources for that person appear instead of just > the one I want. If you want to put in more than one source for an event > (e.g. birth), how does that work? > > The two main views are slow to update and look clumsy. I think that this is > because all the windows resize. Is it not possible to have an option which > fixes the size of the window and the child windows? It is not clear where > or what you should click on (or even left/right/double). Use should be made > of standard sized buttons to signify edit/view for each field or object in > windows and dialogs. For instance I discovered, by accident, that if you > click on the back ground next to the wife box, then you get her second > husband in the husband box. > > 2. It is difficult to navigate around families and get an idea for how they > are related. Kith and Kin's main view is a tree diagram of families, where > each family has a box, and the relationships between the families are shown. > This is a great feature for navigating the hundreds of families in the > database, as well as seeing links relationships and 'orphan' family groups. > > However the more I use Legacy, the more I find I can live with the above, > but what is not present is a good tree diagram creator. One along the lines > of a drawing package (e.g. Visio) which lets you create your own family > tree, save it, and update the details from the database as it is changed. > Again Spansoft have this utility (TreeDraw), which I will continue to use, > but it is a pain because I have to export from Legacy to Kith and Kin via > Gedcom each time, and I don't want to maintain 2 data bases. But I can > create great family tree wall charts showing relationships between all the > individuals, not just direct ancestor/descendant trees, all arranged in a > suitable way (because lets face it software is not very good at auto > arranging diagrams to make best use of space and make it look good). > > Having said all that in general great product and great support, so I feel a > bit churlish complaining given the value for money. > > Best regards > > _____________________________________________________ > John Kendall > Eurostep Limited > 2, Byrneside | Mobile: +44 (0) 7899 992519 > Hildenborough | E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Kent TN11 9EG > United Kingdom > > Eurostep - Open Solutions, Organisations and People > Eurostep home page http://www.eurostep.com > _____________________________________________________
