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jim.orrell

Faster person search

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Whilst the people search and filter options in TMG are very powerful, they are a bit pedantic and very very slow if all you want is to look for a person by SURNAME and/or FORENAME (or parts of).

 

1. Is there any way of switching off the tedious "Filter Progress" window with its "I'm wasting my life away" countdown?

 

2. What is required is a simple hot key or button for a quick search that displays a box, you enter a surname (or part of) and/or forename (or part of) and the results are shown in Project Explorer or similar. E.g. "OTT TER" would find Peter Otter or Teresa Pott.

 

I am sure this is not available at present (please tell me if it is), can anyone advise of the quickest way to find a single person.

 

3. While I am at it, another thing that slows down the finding of individuals is on the Project Explorer. If you drag the scroll bar with your mouse, it does not scroll the data at the same time, you have to wait until you remove your mouse, you could end up anywhere! You can only move it up and down by clicking in the scroll bar, you can't even use the page up/down keys. The EZSearch toolbar is very old hat and takes up desktop, surely the modern option for that would be to just press the key on the keyboard which would take you to the alphabetical position in the list.

 

Are there faster ways of moving around the Project Explorer?

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Whilst the people search and filter options in TMG are very powerful, they are a bit pedantic and very very slow if all you want is to look for a person by SURNAME and/or FORENAME (or parts of).

 

1. Is there any way of switching off the tedious "Filter Progress" window with its "I'm wasting my life away" countdown?

 

2. What is required is a simple hot key or button for a quick search that displays a box, you enter a surname (or part of) and/or forename (or part of) and the results are shown in Project Explorer or similar. E.g. "OTT TER" would find Peter Otter or Teresa Pott.

 

I am sure this is not available at present (please tell me if it is), can anyone advise of the quickest way to find a single person.

 

Are there faster ways of moving around the Project Explorer?

Jim,

What Virginia didn't make entirely clear is that to jump to a single person, F2 to bring up the Picklist, then F2 to bring up the box to type the name without activating the letter by letter process, eg

Doe, jane

can be input all at once in this box and jump straight to the first one of those

 

For finding names by parts etc, I use a number of preset filters on the Project Explorer

eg

surname contains x and given contains y where the generic filter is set up with [?] for the x and y so you can reuse it.

That's probably not explained very well but I'm sure it will be in Help somewhere.

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Whilst the people search and filter options in TMG are very powerful, they are a bit pedantic and very very slow if all you want is to look for a person by SURNAME and/or FORENAME (or parts of).

 

 

3. While I am at it, another thing that slows down the finding of individuals is on the Project Explorer. If you drag the scroll bar with your mouse, it does not scroll the data at the same time, you have to wait until you remove your mouse, you could end up anywhere! You can only move it up and down by clicking in the scroll bar, you can't even use the page up/down keys. The EZSearch toolbar is very old hat and takes up desktop, surely the modern option for that would be to just press the key on the keyboard which would take you to the alphabetical position in the list.

 

Are there faster ways of moving around the Project Explorer?

 

I second the request for the data scroll with the Project Explorer bar. I brought that up as a wishlist item a few weeks ago, but it seemed to land here with a thud. I think the PE would be far more useful if it had that feature. As for the EZSearch bar, I've given up on that. It does nothing of any use that I can see.

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Thanks to all of you for your responses. I've used TMG for a while and never knew of the F2 followed by F2. I think I might use it more now. But its a pity:

1. It doesn't keep the previous search when you use it again.

2. That you have to key in the full Surname, xx. If you have a long surname that's a pain. I.e. if you abbreviate the surname before your comma it will not find it.

 

As regards the "use a number of preset filters on the Project Explorer", I had thought of that as an option, but as your database gets bigger (only a 1000 names now) it is very slow, compounded by that awful "countdown" box which I can't find a way to get rid of!!!

 

I think I might also try my query with the Rootsweb TMG message board.

 

Thanks again,

slightly less frustrated

Jim

 

P.S. It says I'm getting email notifications, but I've not seen any!

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..

 

As regards the "use a number of preset filters on the Project Explorer", I had thought of that as an option, but as your database gets bigger (only a 1000 names now) it is very slow, compounded by that awful "countdown" box which I can't find a way to get rid of!!!

..

Jim,

Possibly you could improve performance by checking out the

File>Maintenance>Performance recommendations?

 

I have a rather large database (some 46,000) and filtering the PE doesn't take long at all.

Mind you I've thrown heaps of memory and resources at my pc, which helps a lot.

I rather like the countdown as it tells me whether or not my multiple line query has hit the right combinations or I'm going to have to redo it.

So if it was to go, I'd like that optional please.

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