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Michael Hannah

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Everything posted by Michael Hannah

  1. Keystrokes

    While I generally use the mouse, I thought I would test this for myself. I have found that the developers listen more carefully to detailed suggestions. I agree there are issues here. - When you ask to Merge Two People you can Tab to everything except the binocs, so you have to know the IDs or use the mouse. - When the Merge window appears, focus is in the tags of the merge "from" person. While you can use tab, arrow, and space to select which tags to merge, I can find no key to move focus out of these tags. - If you mouse click to the "to" tags your focus is also stuck there as above. - There seem to be no keystrokes available to get to or activate any of the buttons. I presume this is your major concern and wish? Does this accurately summarize your issues with Merge? Don't know if the developers can/will enhance this, but if we users are more specific they seem to be more responsive.
  2. Hi Utrecht, Sorry to hear about your problem. You may want to contact TMG Support directly, but you also may want to investigate further first. What OS are you running? On another user forum about cyber topics I have seen (and encountered on my own computer) problems with one of the latest security patches [KB951748] from MicroSoft for XP. Do you do automatic MS updates? If you have XP and ZoneAlarm you may want to uninstall that patch. Have you installed something else new on your computer? What has changed? You could simply uninstall and download and reinstall TMG (but be sure you still have your unlock code!). It is possible that something else has corrupted your TMG installation? As a fellow user that is about all I can think of to suggest.
  3. Show Approx Age at Death in Ahnentafel?

    Hi, I don't regularly use the Ahnentafel report but tried it and notice it seems to use standard Tag sentences. Can I assume that you are using the [A] variable to get the age in your Death tag? If so, you may find my notes of the difference between the [A] variable and the [AE] variable of value. The [A] variable produces output in years only when both the primary tag in the Birth group and the tag that contains the [A] variable contain the full (day, month, year) dates, and the age is over one year. If either date has an appended question mark, then the age will have an appended question mark. It returns no value when the age can not be precisely calculated (e.g. incomplete dates that have only the year). If the [A] is bound by conditional brackets “” then the sentence variable is ignored for incomplete dates or an age less than one year and no age is output. An unconditional use of the variable will return “at an unknown age” for incomplete dates. Alternatively, the [AE] variable will produce an exact age (years, months, and days) if both dates are complete. It will still produce output even if only approximate dates are known, but it will be only years. The TMG documentation calls [AE] an exact age variable, I choose to call it an exact or estimated age variable. I am currently unaware of a variable to always output just years regardless of the completeness of the dates. Thus, for those people whom you know have incomplete dates you may want to construct your Death tag to have an alternate Role with a sentence that uses the [AE] variable instead of the [A] variable. Hope this gives you ideas,
  4. Nicknames

    Helmut, What Terry suggested is correct, but... If you choose that Name-Var as the name to be used in another tag, and if the sentence structure would output the full name, and if you have your report Options set to Show Excluded Data, (an awful lot of 'if's ), then using only one hyphen will output the text you have set for "unknown surname", usually "(--?--)". To avoid that, I always use the double dash exclusion mark '--' in the surname for these circumstances.
  5. Hiding 'non-person' witnesses

    Yes, that is why I have been careful in my sentences in when or whether to use [WO]. I know of no current way to make the link to a Witness "excluded data" so that you can set report options to include or exclude that link. Since the TMG Help topic on "Exclusion" does not indicate you can use the '-' on the Witness ID number (but does mention Principals) I assume it is not implemented. I agree both that it should probably give an error, and might be a nice suggestion for a future enhancement. You might join the TMG Chat this weekend and suggest it. If enough of us users ask for it then Bob may consider it. Many enhancements have been direct results of user suggestions. Until then, if you want to exclude some Witnesses, you cannot use [WO] you must use Roles and list those roles you want. Sorry but at least you know how to proceed.
  6. Hiding 'non-person' witnesses

    I don't believe you can do this for Witnesses. Even for Principals I don't think it will do what you want. My notes show that a leading ‘-’ in the Principal’s ID number marks this name as excluded data to not display in the Person View on the tag when the “other” principal is the focus if “Preferences>Tag Box>Show excluded data” is not set, but does not exclude the name from still being output in some reports. I use non-persons all the time. The simple way I have found to exclude them from reports is by use of a flag, which I have created called PSEUDO. Its default value is set to 'N' for all "real" people and to some other value to reflect the "kind" of pseudo person. I then filter all reports to only include people with the value 'N'. I think this may get what you want. Let me know if you still have problems. Hope this gives you ideas. [edited later] Hmmmm.... reread your post and I believe [WO] is designed to give all witnesses regardless of being assigned a role. My notes to myself remind me not to use [WO] when I only want some of the Witnesses. I don't think you can use that variable when you have these situations.
  7. How to work if a place name was changed?

    Yep, and it is the same with place names. You can have as many as you want for a give place and just like people names you can control which one you use with an event. The key is that you control which one. Just like people name variations increases the number of name records in a List of Names, so does place names increase the number of records in the Master Place List or List of Places. Again, I wonder why you find this increased number of place records a problem? Are you having issues with finding an appropriate place name or trying to group them together in a sort for places? There are a number of tricks people have used to help this. Or is it something else? If we could understand the issue better maybe one of us users could suggest some ideas that may help?
  8. site logs me out

    Our area has (finally) gotten (very slow) DSL broadband so am now accessing the site with it. My DSL router is set (and not changeable by me) to drop the line if I am inactive for 5 minutes but to re-establish immediately if I need it. Most of the time this is totally transparent to me. Unfortunately it appears that this line drop logs me out of the Wholly Genes forum site. I will be composing a long reply to a post and by the time I hit Submit the site tells me I am not logged in. Other forum sites I use do not seem to exhibit this behavior. Is there some personal setting I can make to my account, or something else someone can suggest? It is easy to log back in, and the site provides my text so I can copy it and then paste in the new login, but this is getting annoying. Anyone have any recommendations?
  9. site logs me out

    Thanks John and Virginia, Since the time I posted this I have been able to convince my DSL provider to increase my idle timeout value. That seems to have solved the problem. John, I suspect that your guess about the IP address is correct since I am behind my own hardware firewall and it does seem to (sometimes) assign a new IP address when the DSL reconnects.
  10. How to work if a place name was changed?

    You might think it would be great to have TMG smart enough to be able to pick an appropriate "name" for a place depending upon the date of the event, but I believe previous comments have shown that this would be counter to basic principles of the TMG authors. First, many users believe the place name should show what is documented concerning that event, even if that place name might differ from other documentation sources and might even differ from what would "automatically" be chosen based on the date. Second, the TMG authors seem to have a strong aversion to having the software automatically make assumptions concerning your data. I don't think they would want the software to "assume" that the place name was one of many names based on a date. They seem to want to be sure that you can choose to have the place name what you want, and it be your decision. Personally I am glad they have this aversion to the software making assumptions, and I hope they stick to those principles. You seem to want to avoid multiple place names in TMG's Master Place List for the same physical location. I personally don't see this as a problem, why do you? As for a date limited place name, do you realize that you can specify a date range for a place entry in the MPL? Then you can set your Preferences to warn you whenever you select that place name for an event whose date is outside that range. Thus TMG can help you be sure to select a place name appropriate to a date, but will not do so automatically. Just my observations.
  11. How to work if a place name was changed?

    Hi Peter, Most users recommend that you document the event using the name of the place as it was known at the time of the event. Yes, this will cause multiple entries in the Master Place List for locations that are the same physical location. There are a wide variety of ways to record in TMG that these different place names are all the same. Some users add the name as it is currently know to the place name, often in parentheses, like one of the examples (the other) Michael mentioned. Others use the Comment field in the Master Place list to record the currently known name, although I am currently unaware of any way to get that comment to print in reports. A more complex but often useful method is to create a pseudo "person" that is really the current place name. That "person" can then be linked to the tag, often with a special role name, and optionally a sentence indicating that this is the currently known name for the place. Whether you use one of these or some other method all depends upon how you want to record this information. Hope this gives you ideas,
  12. How very strange. Sorry, but I am out of ideas. Maybe one of the developers or beta testers will comment?
  13. Mark, Gosh, sorry to hear that, not much fun I am sure. Yes, I checked the TMG Utility Help files and can find no capability there. Although I do not use them, I have heard of separate programs that allow you to assign a series of key actions to a special key that then works in other programs. I assume you can identify the specific people and either make them a Focus Group or filter for them in the Project Explorer so you can deal with just these people. Further, if the loss of Primary only affects certain tag groups you might filter the Details window to only display those tag types to reduce the clutter while doing the "clean up". (Of course I assume you know that only one tag among multiples in a given tag group can be Primary.) Of course, while it is usually desirable to have a primary tag in the Birth, Name, and Mother/Father relationship, and Death tag groups, depending upon what you are doing it may not be a problem for Other tag types. Of course I understand the desire to "clean up" the dataset when you notice the problem. Unfortunately I can think of no easy way to identify people who have tag groups where no tag is marked primary. Maybe some other user will have an idea. You said you do "Backup, Validate & Optimise after every merge". Hmmm... I would recommend doing the VFI/Optimize pair first (repeating the pair only if VFI shows errors) and then do the backup. You probably don't want to backup/save a file that might contain errors. Very strange. Can you think of anything you did that is unique to that dataset? Is this the only dataset that you have been doing merge with? And what was the source and nature of the merged data? This is very unusual and should not happen.
  14. Witnesses who move away AND BACK

    Hi Rootdigger, I have found that you can do most anything if you are willing to customize TMG and "think upside down" There are probably a large variety of ways, but I will suggest one. I would leave the ADDRESS tag to be used as suggested in the TMG help files, but have a separate tag for each person with a Location that showed their residence with a date range. If you wanted to track who was where even more, I would create a pseudo "person" for the house/address. I probably would not do this for all people, but for some families/houses/locations this can be valuable. The separate tag for each person could be the RESIDENCE tag, or could be a custom tag. I would set P1 as the "real" person and the house "person" as either P2 or maybe a custom Witness role, with the "From-to" date on this tag. Viewing the house "person" you would be able to see who lived there when, and viewing the "real" person you would have where they resided throughout their life. Hope this gives you ideas,
  15. Hi Mark, Did that fix your Primary Tag designations?
  16. Global Surety Change

    I haven't used this particular feature of the TMG Utility, but the following is from the Help documentation. It may be more restrictive than you need. Not sure whether it will work on a tag that has more than one citation but only one from that particular source, but certainly worth investigating. Set One-Citation Surety sets surety values for tags that have a single citation to a specific source. For example, if a Note tag has a citation to source #29, and no other citations, Set One-Citation Surety can be used to set the surety value for any populated field in the event, P1, P2, Date, Place, or Memo (12DPM).
  17. Previous comments have suggested that it is always wise to do an Optimize immediately following any VFI. Further, if a VFI ever gives errors it has always been stressed that you should do another VFI followed by Optimize pair until the VFI shows no errors. Previous explanations of the reason for this have been that fixing some errors now make it possible to identify further errors, so continued VFI/Optimize pairs are required.
  18. Two more footnote questions

    Hi John,As others have mentioned, this is intentional behavior for the five "name" source element groups (Author, Compiler, Editor, Subject, Second Person). This behavior is "triggered" by the presence of a comma when you enter the text of the name. This is why these fields specify that you should enter names as surname followed by a comma followed by given name(s) and multiple names separated by semicolons. However if you fail to enter the comma (e.g. John Smith; Bill Jones) I believe you will get the full names with both given and surname in all types of footnotes. Of course this means that the given name appears first, for example, in the Bibliography, and you will be sorting based on given name not surname, which is probably inappropriate. An alternative way to accomplish exactly what you want is to not enter the names in these source elements. Instead hard code the names as text directly in the (now source unique) source templates themselves. TMG makes it easy to have your source documentation follow common standards, but usually also provides ways to customize your output to get exactly what you want. Hope this gives you ideas,
  19. V7.0 Validation/Problems

    As Neil and Jim said, many have found that you want to run both Optimize and Validate File Integrity (VFI) together, especially after an update. Usually you run Optimize first, then VFI. If you get errors reported by VFI, then run the Optimize/VFI pair again. Keep doing that pair until VFI gives you no errors. At that point run one last Optimize, and you are now good to go.
  20. How do I....

    Glad we could help
  21. TMG on Eee PC in Linux

    Crowzee, TMG is strictly a Windows program. A number of people have TMG working on various Unix/Linux (and Mac) platforms using Windows emulators, such as Parallels. Every time us users suggest a different OS version the emulator method is always mentioned. From comments I have heard previously, the code is written using an MS development infrastructure and would require a complete rewrite to even consider another OS.
  22. How do I....

    There are many equivalent ways to do this, but since your goal is to set the flag, I would use a filter on a List of Events report and then use the report options Secondary Output tab to set your "Boatman" flag for all the people found by the filter. Perhaps a filter like: Tag Type... Label =Equals Occupation AND Memo Contains boatman END Hope this gives you ideas,
  23. tracking hierloom

    Glad this gave you ideas. Since I am just a user like yourself I have no inside information about the future of TMG enhancements or changes. I have simply gotten used to figuring out how to customize TMG to do what I want with the features available. However, in the past the developers have been willing to listen to ideas expressed on this Forum, especially if there is a concrete proposal. Think about exactly what new feature you would like to see, and a suggestion of how it might be implemented in TMG. Then start a new topic with that proposal. Can't hurt, and many user proposals in the past have been adopted in some form or another.
  24. TMG v7.02

    No such thing as stupid when you haven't seen it before. Otherwise I would be calling myself stupid all the time!! Just glad one "part-German" could help a 100% one.
  25. TMG v7.02

    Kenny,Sorry that this is so frustrating. You are not being asked to answer the "same" questions, because both I and Terry are trying to ask a "different" question but we don't seem to be communicating, and are not getting an answer to this "different" question. Let me try with different words. We understand that when you click on the Add menu option you get a new drop-down window. We understand that you then click on the very top menu choice "Add Person". Or equivalently you click on the main toolbar button "Add Person". Now here is what is different. As you well know from your previous use of TMG, a completely new and different window "should" now open which is titled the "Add Person Type" window. Our suspicions are that this new window did open, and TMG is working and simply waiting for you to click a button on that new window. We are guessing that the problem is you cannot see that new window because it is improperly positioned completely off your screen, so you cannot proceed. To prove or disprove our suspicions please try the following: After clicking on the menu choice of "Add Person', click on the main TMG menu item called "Window". This should give you a new pull-down menu. Everything should be grey except the menu choice "Center the current window". Click that. We "believe" that the "Add Person Type" window will now be visible and you can proceed. Please try that and let us know what happens so if our guess is wrong we can try to think of something else to suggest. A descendent of stubbon German ancestors, and darn proud of it
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