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Gedcom Imports

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I obtained several gedcoms and cannot import any them. They are all plain text documents saved as whatever.ged, but all of them are saved as whatever.ged.txt, so naturally TMG doesn't import them. I have tried several editors (various versions of Word, Notpad), but can't seem to save them properly. I never had a problem doing this in the 4.x versions of TMG, but am getting nowhere fast with the 7.x version. What am I missing?

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Use Windows Explorer to rename them to remove the ".txt" extension.

Hi Terry- Using Windows Explorer was the first thing I tried when the "Save as" in Word didn't work. Despite renaming using Explorer and also trying to change the attributes (e.g., make it something other than a txt file and make it a file that would open in TMG), it still comes up as a text file and TMG won't open it. I just don't get it.

Bev

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Bev -

 

You have renamed the extension .ged in Windows Explorer? Try this:

 

Open the file in Notepad, then click on File > Save As. At that window, change the 'save as' type to :All Files and change the encoding to Ansi.

 

Virginia

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Did you rename them using Windows Explorer so that the extenstion was now only ".ged" and not ".ged.txt"? What error messages do you get when you try to open them in TMG? You said they are plain text files. Can you open them with an editor? What do the first couple of lines look like? You said that you tried to "Save as" in Word. Did you "Save as" a text file and not a Word document? Have you tried opening them with Notepad instead of Word? Something must be strange about these files as lots of people have no problem with importing GEDCOM files into TMG.

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Bev -

 

You have renamed the extension .ged in Windows Explorer? Try this:

 

Open the file in Notepad, then click on File > Save As. At that window, change the 'save as' type to :All Files and change the encoding to Ansi.

 

Virginia

Thanks Virginia- that solved it. I can't help but wonder why after doing this for years in Word Perfect and several versions of Word and several versions of TMG it became a problem. I am grateful for the solution.

Regards- Bev

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Did you rename them using Windows Explorer so that the extenstion was now only ".ged" and not ".ged.txt"? What error messages do you get when you try to open them in TMG? You said they are plain text files. Can you open them with an editor? What do the first couple of lines look like? You said that you tried to "Save as" in Word. Did you "Save as" a text file and not a Word document? Have you tried opening them with Notepad instead of Word? Something must be strange about these files as lots of people have no problem with importing GEDCOM files into TMG.

Hi Michael- I tried all the things you mention, but still kept having a Whatever.ged.txt filename. In Explorer the TXT suffix after the GED suffix was invisible to me- but not to TMG. TMG kept telling me that it wasn't a ged file. I used the method Virginia suggested and it worked, but I do prefer to understand these things. I had taken a three year break from genealogy and gone through some software upgrades in everything, from Windows to Word to TMG, but previously I too had edited gedcoms in Word, saved them as text files and imported them into TMG with no difficulties. Thanks for responding.

Regards- Bev

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Bev -

 

What I gave you was the workaround from TMG Help for importing a gedcom that was exported using the Unicode (UFT-8) character set (which TMG does not support and cannot import) - but I would have expected you to have had a 'wrong header' error message. You did not mention getting that message.

 

Anyway, I'm glad that it worked -

 

Virginia

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In Explorer the TXT suffix after the GED suffix was invisible to me- but not to TMG.

Bev,

 

That's the result of MicroSoft's inscrutable position that users shouldn't see the file extensions despite the fact that they are key to operation of many functions in Windows, as you learned.

 

To solve that problem, every Windows users should disable the option that hides those extensions. In Windows 7, and I think in most versions of Windows, you do that by opening Windows Explorer and on the Tools menu, choosing the Folder Options command. On the Folder Options dialog, click the View tab, then in the Advanced Settings box, untick the "Hide Extension for known file types" option.

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Thanks for all the help! I did go into Windows Explorer and change the way file names are viewed and then eliminated the extensions following .ged- and naturally got a warning from Windows that this would make things unstable- which, of course, did not happen. The reasoning of MS is inscrutable for sure. Makes genealogy look easy by comparison- Bev

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