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I have a general question about the validate file integrity routine. I've been using TMG for about 3 months now and have a relatively small database at this point with about 2,500 people in a single dataset in a single project. I originally started using TMG with v6.09. During the 3 months that I have been using TMG I have run the validate file integrity routine fairly regularly just to make sure I didn't have any "issues", and up until today the routine has run through without finding anything to fix. This morning I upgraded the software to v6.10. The upgrade performed flawlessly. I noticed the note stating that changes had been made to the validate file integrity routine to correct additional problem areas, so I ran validate file integrity shortly after performing the upgrade. This time, instead of a clean run, I got a message telling me that something like 2,900 potential problems had been corrected. I ran the validate file integrity routine again immediately and got a clean run the second time. I was caught a little off guard by the large number that had been reported. So my question is this. What sorts of things is the validate file integrity routine now looking for that would cause my small-scale project to report nearly 3,000 potential problems? Were there problem areas in my original data that I didn't even know about? And when the routine says that it has "corrected" possible problems, what exactly does that mean? Have any alterations been made to the data? I am just grasping here to try to understand what goes on when I run the validate file integrity routine. Thanks Mike

Thanks for the responses. I also took a look at the TMG-L thread and now have a better understanding of what is taking place.

Hi Terry I've been playing with census tags for the past few days, and read your article titled "Census Tag - Expanded" with great interest. I have created a few new tags for different census years using your guidelines, and have found them to be a very powerful but flexible tool. Most census scenarios I have been able to deal with by just playing around until I get it right. But there is one thing I haven't been able to figure out yet, and I'm hoping you might be able to enlighten me. When I have 2 principals in the census tag, those being a man and his wife, where do I place information that should only apply to one or the other of the principals. For example, in one case the husband is listed on the 1930 census as a merchant with his own grocery store. I would like to include that information in printouts about the husband, without it showing up on the printouts for the wife also. In the case of witnesses, that causes me no problem, because I can control their text individually through the witness memo fields. But for the principals, pretty much whatever I print for one is also printing for the other, because their information is coming from the memo field on the census tag itself. What am I not seeing here? Thanks Mike

Hi I have a couple of small datasets where all of the information in them came from a single source. I would like to add 1 relevant source citation for each tag in these datasets before bringing the data into my master dataset. I know I have seen that done before, but for the life of me, I can't remember how it was done. Can John Cardinal's TMG utility do that? And if so, how do I go about it? Thanks Mike D.

Thanks again, Terry. Once again, you have pulled my fat out of the fire and saved me a bunch of aggrivation.

Thanks for all of the suggestions, Terry. Using that structure should work quite well for me. I had fairly well settled on the tag structure as you have it defined on your tips page, but for some reason I just couldn't make the scenario of children by multiple marriages work out. I have also tried some of the more complex approaches, but quickly found that they get endlessly bogged down by the innumerable relationship possibiilties with family members. But all of this looks so easy, when I see your written examples... So how come I feel like I'm beating my head against the floor when I work with the sentence structures on my own? Thanks again Mike

I have been enjoying this line of discussion this morning, most especially since I am going to be working with census records for some time to come. My work this morning has brought up yet another question about how best to enter census information within the framework of Terry's expanded census tag. I have many families where the combined children are the product of more than two spouses. Most commonly, a widowed spouse with children who has remarried and then had more children by the second spouse. In some cases I have spouses who have been widowed twice, have children by both marriages, and then remarry a third time and have more children. I have at least one family where a widowed man with children married a widowed woman with children and then they had yet more children. My question is how to set up my principal and rolls so everything fits right and prints right when the children living in the household were the product of multiple relationships. Thanks Mike D.

Hi Terry Thanks for the response. I agree in general about the occupation from the census belonging in an occupation, but once in a while, especially when there are just a few odd bits of extra data in the census record, it seems cleaner to place it all inside of the single tag. I gave your suggestion about using [M2] and [M3] a quick tryout, and that readily accomplishes what I had in mind. Thanks so much for the help. This wonderful community that we have here is one of the many things that places TMG way beyond it's competition. Mike D.

I've been playing around with the expanded Census Tag article on Terry's TMG Tips page. I didn't have any trouble getting the mechanism in place, because his directions were very clear and well presented. But in looking at the place data on some of my census forms, I'm a little unclear as to the best way to present it in the tag. For example, one record that I am working with is for the 1920 census in St. Mary's County, Maryland. The name of the county and state present no problem. The "Name of Incorporated Place" blank on the St. Mary's 1920 census records that I have is frequently left blank. That is perhaps because, even today, there is only one incorporated town in all of St. Mary's County. So the fact that my ancestor lived in the village of Mechanicsville is not recorded on the census form. What is typically recorded in the "Township or Other Division of County" blank is the election district number - in this case "5th Election District". The detailed address data is almost meaningless for a single family, because it is written in the long blank on the left side of the census form as "South of the road from Dubois to New Market to Huntersville to Persimmon Creek". This information applies to every family on the census page. My problem arises because there is only a single "City" field on the tag form. In a case where it is listed on the census form, like Leonardtown, I can put that in the city field, but then I don't have anywhere to put the election district. If I don't know the city, I could put the election district in the city field, and that works, but I don't like to do it that way, since "5th Election District" isn't a city or town name. Does anyone have any adivce? Thanks Mike

Thank you, Alison and Teresa, for the helpful information. Sometimes I can't see the forest for the trees, and it really helps to have thoughtful souls like you out there to point me in the right direction.

I prefer external. Internal images can make an enormous difference in the size of backups. Plus, I personally prefer maintaining and editing my images with a bona-fide image editing tool. I keep the master images in a couple of very safe locations, one on an external hard drive and backed up on CD. Then I place copies only of the master images in a folder that is accessable to TMG.

witelite, You are quite welcome. I forget mine is there too, until I hit it by accident once in a while and then find my FKeys doing crazy things. Mike

Hi What kind of PC keyboard are you using? Mine, for example is a Logitech keyboard. It has a key on it immediately to the right of the function key panel called "F Mode". If I press it once it changes the mapping of my F Keys to "Enhanced Mode", which opens Excel when I push F3, Word when I press F2 etc. If I press "F Mode" again, it switches back to "Standard Mode", which lets the F Keys perform their normal F Key functions. Hope this helps Mike

Thanks. Hadn't thought about simply reapplying the layout to correct the problem.

Yes, I had read that thread, but its not the point of my original message. I was more interested in what might have caused the disappearing column problem to begin with than I was in the solution. And I wondered if it might be anything like what I observed in the Details form, where I can cause a column to disappear and cannot make it reappear without exiting completely from TMG and reentering. And if I saved my layout on exit (as it prompted me to do), I'm not sure whether I would have been able to get the column back at all.

Hi Vera I've been following this thread with interest too, mostly just to try to understand what it was that caused the problem in the first place. I have a theory about the cause, and I thought I would ask your opinion about it. The example I will give is on the Person part of the Details form, rather than in the picklist, because what I want to talk about is easier to see there than anywhere else. If I place my mouse cursor on the right-hand vertical bar of the "Type" label (the one right under the Person tab, and right above the "Name", "Father" and "Mother" fields), and drag it slightly to the left, it shrinks the size of the "Type" field. That action also moves the "Name" field (which is immediately to the right of it) slightly to the left and exposes the right-hand border of the "Name" field. If I then place my mouse cursor on the now exposed right-hand vertical bar of the "Name" label, and move my mouse to leftwards to shrink the size of the "Name" field, I can shrink the size of my "Name" field until it has completely disappeared. But what is strange here, is that in the case of the "Name" field in this form, I can not re-size the width of the field back to its original size. If I try to grab the edge of the field with the mouse to re-size it, all that happens is that the "Type" field gets bigger, but the "Name" field remains hidden. The only way that I can get my "Name" field back (that I know of), is to exit from TMG without saving layout changes, and then re-enter TMG. I did not try exiting after saving layout changes, because I wasn't sure whether I would easily get my "Name" field back if I did. Now I know that this doesn't happen in all columns in all TMG grids. For example, right on that same form you can drag the "Name/Place" column to the left and completely hide the "Date" column to the left of it. But you can also re-size the "Date" column to its original size with no problem. But it makes me wonder, could a similar issue have affected the expanded picklist, or is what I am talking about here a different issue altogether. Thanks Mike

What would happen if you created a flag and then used it to filter only the records you want to see?

I agree, Ben. Especially about the FAC page. I've only been around for a couple of months now, but I believe that nearly every point I have raised has been in the area of something that has already been discussed before. A well-organized FAC page can cut WAY down on repetitive questions and comments in the forums.

could I add a third, please?

Hi Vera Thanks so much for your inputs. This entire thread has just saved me a vast amount of time. One of these days I will get the enormous value of customized Tags through my thick skull. This process works like a charm. - Mike D.

Hi Even as a relative newcomer to the genealogy arena, I am finding myself faced with a rapidly ballooning wealth of documentation. I've been playing around with the idea of using a software like Clooz as an electronic filing cabinet, especially for things like census, birth, marriage and death records. As of yet I'm still in the Clooz trial period, and haven't actually purchased it. 1. Are there any other similar softwares that I might want to consider? It would be especially helpful if such a software could be used on my Palm LifeDrive. 2. Are there any of these document management softwares that TMG works and plays with better than others? 3. Has WG given any consideration to the idea of incorporating a document management module into TMG? Number 3 would be a really cool thing to have!

Thanks for the inputs. I really haven't decided what I want to do as yet. I currently use TMG in conjunction with GedStar Pro to view my data on my Palm when I'm away from home. That has been a great investment. It weighs practically nothing, and I don't have to lug my 9lb. laptop with me everywhere I go. I avoided handhelds like the plague itself for years, and now that I have one I don't know how I got along without it. What really sold me on the Palm LifeDrive was the 4 Gig internal hard drive, because I can download pictures from my digital cameras straight to it while I'm in the field, and it doubles as an image viewer. But I only see a document management application as partly redundant, and that is the part that relates to the digital images and their source locations. But it can also contain transcription information from the original documents, and that information can be searched, filtered, analyzed and reported on just like the information in any other database. And those are the things about an application like Clooz that I find appealing. I think something like that could be useful if you want to know how many and what types of documents you have that relate to "John Smith", and what they contain. But for the people-relationship-centric portion of what I want to do, TMG is the clear King of Softwares. I tried out a rather large sampling of competitive softwares over the past 6 months or so, and I didn't encounter a single other genealogy database that came close to TMG for functionality and flexibility. Ease of use is another matter, but I'm not particularly concerned that it will take a great deal of time to master the software.

Hi Vera Thanks for the information, and I can work around the problem through the TMG-Word-Excel solution until the problem is fixed. And in the future, I'll make a better keyword search before I report problem issues. Thanks

Hi, I hesitate to enter into this discussion after my debacle with an exploding Tag form the night before last, that I then couldn't replicate later, but I played with the Excel option for a while after I saw this thread. The Excel output option is of considerable interest to me, because in conjunction with the power of the flexibility of the listing reports, it gives you the power to send a large quantity of raw data from TMG out to a format where it can be massaged and viewed in a large variety of ways. But here is what happened when I tried the Excel output option. I used the "List of People" report for my test because it is a simple columnar report that offers a large number of data fields to choose from. I chose a very simple report format containing only 4 columns, which were basically surname, given name, date of birth and date of death. I executed the report only for the current focus person. First I printed the report to the screen and that worked fine, with the 1 detail line that I was expecting. Then I directed the output to a Word file, using the "Word for Windows 2000 or later" selection in the file type dropdown box. My PC runs under Windows XP Media Center Edition and has MicroSoft Office 2003 Professional installed on it, which of course includes both Word and Excel. TMG created the Word file flawlessly and asked me if I wanted to open the document in Word to look at it. It looked just as expected. Then things got exciting when I performed the same actions for Excel. I directed the output to an Excel file, using the "MicroSoft Excel v5 XLS" selection in the file type dropdown box. When I hit the Print and Save button everything seemed well for a short time, and then the whole world exploded. First I got an error message: "operator/operand type mismatch O NOSENSI". Then I got another error message: "Function argument value, type, or count is invalid O NOSENSI". You also get an Abort/Retry,Ignore dialog which lets you abort the program. Unfortunately, however, it left me with the report definition form open and with no way to close it, and I can't get back to the main TMG menu to shut the system down. So the only way to close the application from this point was through the Windows task manager. I tried it 3 separate times using slightly different report columns and/or people, and got the same result each time. I did not conduct this test with any of the other TMG reports, mostly because I'm not very happy about having to shut down the application through the Windows Task Manager every time the report fails. There were no related messages in the vfp7err.log file. However, there were several pertinent lines in the error.txt file: 2006.08.17, 00:29:37 1925Unknown member ROLOCALE. 0 MARKLANGUAGE 2006.08.17, 00:30:10 1925Unknown member ROBOOKMARKMAN. 0 FRMCHART5.UNLOAD 2006.08.17, 00:30:13 1925Unknown member ROTMPOBJ. 0 FRMREPORTOPTIONS.UNLOAD 2006.08.17, 00:47:33 107Operator/operand type mismatch. 0 NOSENSI 2006.08.17, 00:47:45 107Operator/operand type mismatch. 0 NOSENSI 2006.08.17, 00:47:46 12Variable '' is not found. 0 R_LOP 2006.08.17, 00:52:15 1925Unknown member ROLOCALE. 0 MARKLANGUAGE 2006.08.17, 01:00:06 107Operator/operand type mismatch. 0 NOSENSI 2006.08.17, 01:00:36 11Function argument value, type, or count is invalid. 0 NOSENSI 2006.08.17, 01:01:09 11Function argument value, type, or count is invalid. 0 NOSENSI 2006.08.17, 01:01:11 12Variable 'X' is not found. 0 NOSENSI 2006.08.17, 01:01:13 107Operator/operand type mismatch. 0 NOSENSI 2006.08.17, 01:01:14 12Variable '' is not found. 0 R_LOP 2006.08.17, 01:02:22 1925Unknown member ROLOCALE. 0 MARKLANGUAGE Am I doing something wrong here, or is there a problem with the Excel output functionality? Any suggestions here would be gratefully appreciated, because the ability to save output in Excel format is of great interest to me. Many of the people that I communicate with are Excel "weenies" and the ability to generate output in this format will be of great benefit.

I seem to have hit a rather nasty if somewhat obscure bug in the Tag entry form in TMG v 6.09. It happened to me in the Divorce Tag entry form, although I don't think it really matters which tag form it is, as long as it has date and sort date fields, and a place to enter citations. I was in the process of editing a divorce tag that I had previously entered in my data set to fix some data that I had entered incorrectly. I currently use the untabbed versions of the tag entry forms. I can replicate this error over and over. 1. I double click on the Divorce tag in the person's record on the person form. 2. When the Divorce Tag form comes up, it already has values that I had previously entered in it for the two principals, the date, the sort date and it also has one citation. 3. The problem that I had in my data that I needed to correct was that I had accidentally placed a date in both the date and sort date fields, when only the sort date should have had an entry. 4. In my case, both of those date fields contained "after 06/06/1978". Now here's what I did to generate the error: 5. When the Tag entry form came up, the date field was already hi-lighted, just as it should be. 6. I pressed the "Del" key on the keyboard to delete the contents of the date field. 7. Instead of tabbing out of the field, I then double clicked on the single citation that I had entered, because I wanted to update its citation detail. 8. TMG then gave me the message asking if I wanted to update the sort field, just as I would have expected. 9. I clicked on the "No" button, and the program blew sky-high. 10. First it gave me the nasty fatal exception message that I have included with this message. 11. Then it terminated TMG and placed me back at my desktop. 12. I can replicate this failure over and over again. Interestingly enough, it seems to have something to do with the "after" part of the date field, because if I try to recreate the failure when there are just normal dates in the date fields, like "06/06/1978", instead of "after 06/06/1978", it works fine. Has anyone else run across and reported this particular error?