pktropics

I'm not sure what outcome yo'ure after. Is it to print all charts on the one page, or combine them into a single file with multiple pages? A way of achieving either is to cut and paste each chart into a Word document. You can then arrange them either as multiple graphics on a single page, or each on its own page. Hope this helps

I have been syncing TMG databases between desktop and laptop computers for years, without problem. But with care! 1. Always make a backup before syncing, 2. Never use the two machines simultaneously - that is, re-sync before shifting from one machine to the other. 3. Maintain the same file path structure and labeling on each machine. I use the desktop in the office, and laptop in the field, so the risk of mixing things up is minimal.

I have both an iPod touch and an iPad. I have been using an App called "Famviewer" which reads Gedcom files into the device through a wi-fi link to my PC. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good,and works equally well on both. You can't edit the database but it does let you make notes which you can then email to yourself. Is there any chance of Wholly Genes developing an App? I suspect not in the forseeable future.. A pity, because an editable version for iPad would let me use it in place of a laptop in the field.. Pktropics

I concur. In fact, I would go further. The indented chart is the quickest chart to generate and I use it more than any other for producing 'working charts' for people to review and correct. It's also often the best for presentation in written reports because it automatically fits to A4 sized pages. I have some macros programmed in Word to quickly make cosmetic changes to the chart (for example, I replace the '+' with "=" for the marriage relationship, and others for inserting gender symbols before the person's name). Because these charts are so easy to generate, it would be very useful to be able to show other types of tags - not because you would necessarily want to show them all at once, but it may be useful to be able to quickly produce a chart that highlights some particular type of event. One drawback with these charts is that it is easy to loose track of generational levels and marriage connections when then chart goes across multiple pages, particularly where an individual has several marriages, each with children, grandchildren and so on. The chart would be a bit more readable if the name of the descendant spouse were repeated for each of his/her marriages, so it is always immediately apparent without having to back-track through the pages. pktropics.

I use a shareware back-up/copy/synchronise program (Second Copy) to synchronise all my data (including TMG) between my office based PC and my laptop. This has the added advantage of having everything always backed-up on the other computer. I've recently changed to a new Windows 7 64 bit system, and this program continues to work OK, synchronising between Windows 7 64 bit and Vista 32 bit on the lap-top. BUT two essential precautionary rules: 1. Only use one machine at a time, and always re-synchronise if changing from one machine to the other; 2.ALWAYS back-up before synchronising, just in case something goes wrong (which it never has for me, except occasionally when I've forgotten to follow rule 1!) You may have to run maintenance-validation to pick up the exhibits when you move to the other computer; and repeat values, layouts, etc. don't go across either - but this is usually not a problem, as those from previous sessions on that machine will continue to apply. pktropics

I see V.8 is on its way. Can I again register my perennial request that the developers include the facility to include symbols - either triangle and squares or gender symbols (ideally both) - into charts and reports. For those of us working mostly with non-anglo-saxon genealogies, these are essential as names alone do not indicate a person's gender to an anglo-saxon audience; likewise in upper generations where often a person's name is no longer recalled or known, except for colour coding (which is not much use for black and white re-productions), there is no automatic way that a person's gender can be conveniently shown on charts. This facility is available in some other programs, but in the past there seems to have been resistance in the TMG community to this innovation, which I have never understood. Thanks to Virginia and a few other generous users, a few years ago I was introduced to ways of getting around this deficiency, but they are neither very elegant nor simple solutions (though they do work, for which I continue to be grateful those who assisted at the time). I live in hope. pktropics

I'm pretty sure I know what the answer to this is going to be! But worth a try anyhow! I recently imported a new dataset via GEDCOM from Brothers Keeper. The original had non-unique data in the Reference field, which came across into the TMG Reference field. This data should be in a custom Tag rather than the Ref. field. There are about 1400 instances. Is there a way of converting? I've looked at TMG Utility, but can't see that it helps. pktropics

Neil, Many thanks, that worked a treat. I was able to generate a list of people report with the necessary 8 tabbed field by entering dummy fields in the Output Columns and then doing some straightforward find and replacing on the text file to empty all but the ID and Reference fields before going through the TMGU routine. I then used TMGU Find and Replace to delete the original Reference field contents. pktropics

Initiating a discussion about sex vs gender is not necessarily the lightest thing to do. By grammatical I assume you mean linguistic as in the classification of nouns in some romantic and other language families as "masculine" and "feminine". But gender is also a sociological concept used to describe social divisions based upon, but not necessarily coincidental with, anatomical sex, and is used to refer to social, cultural and psychological attributes by which we categorise humans (and often domestic animals as well) as being masculine, feminine, etc. Genealogies may be primarily a biological record (e.g. when used in medical science research and epidemiology), but they are also social/cultural artefacts which record sets of convenionalised social relationships. These are commonly modelled in terms of biological (or these days, genetic) relationships, but they are none the less cultural constructs. For example, in many non-European cultures, no distinction is made in the kinship terminology between siblings and parallel cousins - all are referred to as brothers or sisters; likewise for for mother's sisters and father's brothers, who will be referred to by the saem term as mother and father respectively. Genealogies are based upon, but may not always be the same as, sets of biological relationships. If recording genealogies as sets of purely biological relationships (as in medical research), then it probably is more appropriate to use the term sex. But if the genealogies record what are primarily social relationships, even where these may be modelled upon putative biological relationships, then gender seems to be the more appropriate term. Either way, having ready symbols to clearly distinguish between male and female, whether they be sexes or genders, still makes a lot of sense (to me, at any rate)! pktropics

I've had the following problem for about 12 months now: Frequently when I run "optimize" the program crashes, with an error message such as the one I received today: "Alias 'FILE-NPT' is not found. 617 REINDEXDATASETS". Retry and Ignore only draw more of these errors. Abort closes the program, and then when I try to re-open the database, I get a message such as "Program is open elsewhere at this time" (but its not!), or (as happened today) "An error happened when opening the data tables ..... File c:\ ....\[project filename].dbf not found" Kaput. This has happened so often now that I always back-up before optimizing. Sometimes if I validate the file first, then optimize, it manages to do it without spitting the dummy, but not always. My solution has been to avoid re-indexing or optimizing in order to avoid the hassle of having to restore every time; but today I lapsed back into good practice and, after performing a 'merge' of two projects, did as the program instructed me (ie optimized) only to potentially lose the lot! Any ideas out there? pktropics

Neil Mine happens any old time! I first noticed it after merging projects, but this may have been only because those were mostly the times I optimised. Although, because I now avoid optimising, this may still be the ultimate trigger, simply delayed till the next time I try it (as I did this morning). I am using Vista on a 32 bit system. I have today also re-installed TMG, though I think I may have already tried this in the past. I haven't tried optimising again since re-installing - mainly because I don't want to lose any more time restoring, etc if the problem is still there! Could you report back on what TMG support has to say. Cheers pktropics

Two or three days ago I installed V 7.04. Just noticed today that now all my bookmarks have disappeared. Not 100% sure that the two are related, as it hasn't had the same effect on all projects. Any ideas about whether or not I may be able to resurrect them? pktropics

Many thanks Jim, that fixed it. But I wonder how they came to disappear in the first place? pktropics

I recently started a new project with about 800 people now entered. When I backup, at Step 3 the External Exhibits and Accents boxes are ticked, but greyed out. This means that every time I backup, the exhibits also back-up, which makes the process very slow (I usually don't include external exhibits in TMG backups). But there seems no way to "un-grey" and activate the boxes so that I can un-tick them. I run a number of other projects, none of which have this problem, and as far as I can see the preferences I'm using for the new project are exactly the same as for the others. Any ideas about what's going on? pktropics

Thanks Jim, your usual acuity lead me to a solution, but one which suggests there may be a deeper issue with exhibits. The exhibits I had were attached to sources only, not to people or event tags. Deleting the configuration files did not change things. I also noticed that file validation did not flash up the usual "search for missing external exhibits" window. It seems for some reason the program was not recognising there were external exhibits. However, once I attached an exhibit to a person, the problem went away. File validation now flashes the external exhibit search window and backup is back to normal. Peter

I've been experiencing something similar for the past two or three weeks. When it first started I was still using V. 7.00; I upgraded to 7.01 hoping this might solve it, but no luck. It's now doing it several times a day, with the following message (or a variant thereof): "appdata\local\temp\tmg33763018\apfdef.dbf' does not exist 77 FRMAPSELECTOR.MRUNAP" all I can then do is close the program down using Vista Windows Task Manager, after which it shows the following message: "unknown member ROPROTECTIONMAN" When restarted there has been no loss of data and the program again allows "add person", until the next time it stalls. I always use the pull-down menu to add people; but today I've started using the button in the hope that this might avoid the problem - so far it has, but I've not been doing it for long enough to know for sure. Its a frustration!

When I try to open Flag manager, I get the following error message : "Memo file c:\ {file path} ****_C.FPT file is missing or is invalid. 6550 SETSTANDARDFLAGSDESCRIPTION". Clicking on 'retry' and 'ignore' does nothing, but clicking on 'abort' sends the message away (but does not close the program), and the Flag manager fails to open. The same thing happens if I try to "customise flags" by right clicking from the Flag window. The FTP file is still there, so I guess there's some problem with it. I've validated and optimised the project several times, but to no avail! A bit of background: the last time I had the project open (yesterday), I added a new custom flag, but this did not show up in the Flag window list when I opened the project today. I restored yesterday's backup, and it worked OK, though the new flag likewise did not appear. I then tried replacing the _C.FPT file with that from the restored project, which oddly brought back the new flag to the flag window (??), but again returned the 'missing or invalid file' error when I tried opening the flag manager. I could go back to the restored project, but I had entered new data before the problem arose, so I'd prefer not to if it can be avoided. Any suggestions? pktropics

Peter, Thanks for advice. I have taken the first option and restored the back-up, then re-entered recent data. In the end this seemed the quickest, safest and least messy solution. pktropics

This is how I do it: I run both an office PC and a laptop. When in the office, I have the two machines networked; when away from the office I use the laptop. I use a shareware program called Second Copy to synchronise all my data (including TMG) between the PC and laptop. This serves two purposes. First, it means when I'm working away from the office, I have the same data files and can continue working, then when I get back, the first thing I do is network the computers and run Second Copy. Secondly, it acts as a backup so that I always have the same set of data files on two computers (I also backup onto two external hard drives using the same program, so I have data in four places). As John Cardinals' comments indicate, you have to be a bit careful. You can't work on both machines at the same - when changing from one machine to the other, you MUST do a synchronisation before moving from one machine to the other. As a matter of course, I ALWAYS back up when closing down the program, as an extra precaution in case I muddle things (touch wood, I've not done so yet, but I'm sure it will happen one day). When in the office I have the program set to synchronise every few hours, that way it's very quick (ie it's not having to deal with loads of data changes each time) and it means I can take the laptop at the end of the day and work on it in the evenings. Because I'm constantly changing between PC and laptop, I find this system much easier and quicker than the "orthodox" back-up and restore option; but it does require networking and CARE; I'm not sure I'd be so confident using it through the medium of a USB drive to make the exchange between computers, though I believe Second Copy could be set up to do it this way by running it on both computers. pktropics

I've experienced this problem a few times. The only solution I found was to close down and then re-open the program. I should add that it was with data entered directly into TMG, not imported from any other program, so the problem seems to be within TMG, not necessarily with imported data. pktropics

Jim's point is well made, though the risk would be the loss of recently added data not everything. Its why I never close a file without making a back-up (which I do not synchronise between computers). Kaiyote's alternative is one I thought of using originally, and did for some time. The problem with it is, what happens if you lose your laptop? You lose all your files (not only TMG, but other data as well - word files, exhibits, etc.). With the synchronisation system, you always have a copy of all data on the other computer, so if your laptop does go west or falls under a train or gets dropped by the baggage handlers while away from home, you've got something to come back to! pktropics

The program runs on my PC, but the files "synchronise" both ways; that is, they take the most recent edit and copy it to the other machine. This means you can enter data from either machine, but you have to be careful when you move from one computer to the other that there has been a synchronise backup in between - that is, you can really on work on the one computer at any one time. In practice this is not a problem: when in the office I only use the PC and it's set to automatically synchronise with the laptop on start-up and shut -down, so whenever I turn off and, say, go into the field for a few days with the lap-top, or take it upstairs in the evening (I work from home) it should have the latest version of all my data files on it. When I get back from the field I simply switch on both computers (which are linked on a wireless network), Second Copy opens on the PC and synchronises files across the two machines and I can then start working on the PC. pktropics

If you are able to network your PC and laptop, you can use a backup/synchronisation program. This is how I do it; it synchronises all my data files (not only TMG) between a desktop in the office and a laptop I often use in the evenings and on field trips. This serves the additional function of keeping a current backup of all data on each machine at all times. I use a program called Second Copy, but there are others around as well. I have it set to only touch files that have changed, so if it is run regularly (e.g. daily or even more frequently) its a very fast and efficient system, and it avoids the pitfalls of files getting out of kilter from accidentally opening an older version, etc. Plus you don't have to backup and restore every time you change machines. pktropics