List of Citations report filtered for subject and descendants?

[robinkaspar 0]

I'm cleaning up 25 years of sources and inconsistencies and have a source with 3300 citations. I would like to work on these in an organized and manageable fashion, one family line at a time.

 

Is this one of those situations where I have to run a report first that sets a flag and then run the LOC report on the flag?

If so, I could use some guidance on how to set these up.

 

Thanks!

 

Robin

[Michael Hannah 0]

Hi Robin,

 

There are many ways to approach this, but I think a Flag setting is the one I would use.

 

I would create a temporary Flag, maybe called "SOURCE", with default value 'N' and other value 'Y'.

 

I would then run a List of Events (LOE) report to set that Flag to 'Y' in the Secondary Output options. I would use a Filter on the LOE of:

 

Any Citation... // Src Number // = Equals // [?] // END

 

The report will prompt you for the source number, and then set the Flag for everyone who has a citation to this source in any event.

 

I would then define an Accent that began with a special color for anyone with that Flag value equal to 'Y'. This way it would be easy to see as you work through a family which people have one or more citations from this source.

 

Once you are convinced you have dealt with every citation for that person, manually turn off their Flag, which will turn off their special color.

 

Hope this gives you ideas,

[robinkaspar 0]

I've never worked with accent colors, so bear with me. So, using your method, I won't ultimately be working with a report, I'll see these accents in the project manager? Will it just accent the person? Or will it accent the tag containing the source?

[Michael Hannah 0]

Hi Robin,

 

If you have never worked with Accent colors I think you are in for a treat.

 

For complete details see the TMG HELP, with the separate topic "Accent". But let me walk you through just this one case to start.

 

You are correct that you won't be working with a report. You will see the person's name colored everywhere their name is displayed, which includes in the Project Manager, the expanded Picklist, etc. However, if you want to work from a report instead of accents that is easy. Just run a List of People report filtered for this Flag value equals 'Y'.

 

To use Accents, first, create the Flag and run the report to set its values as mentioned above.

 

Now create the Accent. Press + , select Accent from the File Menu, or double-click on the status bar at the bottom of the screen where it says "Accent". The Accent Definition window will appear.

 

If you have not been using Accents. It will probably be set to "Accent Off". Select "Accent names by the FIRST matching condition".

 

With Accents turned on you will be able to Delete all but one of the example Accent Conditions. With the remaining condition highlighted, go down to the bottom to change "Selected Accent Condition:". On the first pull-down list select your "SOURCE" Flag which you set by the LOE report. Select the condition "=", and value 'Y'. Now choose the Accent colors by clicking the background "..." button, and text "A" button. Choose colors that will stand out for you (i.e. are very different from the colors normally used for people's names in your screen layout). Don't worry about how they will look at first, you can come back and choose different colors later if you wish.

 

Click "Update" to have these setting change the highlighted condition. Now click "Save as..." and save your Accent Definition under some filename, maybe called "Source". (You might also note that there are a number of saved example accents, all with a filename extension of ".acc".) This way you can define different Accents and "Load..." whichever one you wish to work with at the time.

 

Finally, click "OK" and see the results.

 

At any time you can re-open the Accent window and turn your Accent off if you find it distracting, but then turn it back on as you need. And since the Accent is dependent upon the value of the Flag, if you change the Flag value, the colors will automatically change.

 

Hope this gives you ideas,

[robinkaspar 0]

Thanks for the explanation and I can see many applications for using accent colors.

 

However, I don't think they'll help much in my situation. The reason I wanted an LOC report was to see at a glance which tags had the offending source. With just accenting the person, I'd have to go through all the tags manually, looking for that source.

 

So what I ended up doing is running an LOC to Excel, where I sorted by subject 1 and then filtered the citation detail with some unique text. Then I filtered by the most common surname, coming up with 8 pages of tags to fix. After they're all done (and it's going pretty fast thanks to ctrl-I, I already have half of them done) I'll then filter by the rest of the surnames and hopefully there won't be much left to fix.

 

Maybe someday the programmers will see fit to add a flag filter to the LOC report. Or maybe I'm just the only knucklehead who has to pay dearly for setting up sources in the early days without thinking about how they'll be used years later. Well, at least I have sources!

 

Thanks again, Michael.

[Michael Hannah 0]

Okay, Robin, I understand better now. You are correct that the LOC does not have the ability to filter on the value of a Flag for someone in the linked event. That is one reason I generally use the LOE.

... see at a glance which tags had the offending source

For this I still think you might find the original LOE report, including setting the Flag, more useful. Further, the LOE can be filtered on the value of a Flag for someone associated with that event. It can also be filtered based on contents in any cited Citation Detail (but not for specific citation detail associated with a specific source). Maybe:

 

Any Citation... // Src Number // = Equals // [?] // AND

Any Citation... // Citation Detail // Contains // [?] // AND

Principal1.. // Surname // = Equals // [?] // END

 

That report will list the tags which have a citation of that source. You can set the report Options to output appropriate columns, such as "Prin1 ID" "Prin1 Surname" "Tag Type Label" etc., and sort appropriately, either by Surname, or ID number, or whatever. This might save you from your added steps of Excel filtering.

 

Having the Flag would still be of value to me. When I Set the Flag on the first run, I would use the Options for Secondary Output to only set the Flag for "Principal 1". Now when I correct all the events for that Principal-1, I would unset the Flag for that person. That way, at any time, I could re-run the LOE report (but this time not setting the Flag) and use the altered Filter of:

 

Any Citation... // Src Number // = Equals // [?] // AND

Principal1... // SOURCE // = Equals // Y // END

 

That would give me a new list of all the tags/events which have the offending source, but only for Principal1's who have not yet been corrected.

 

Hope this gives you even more ideas,