Help please - v4.0 Flag questions vs. v6.x upgrade

[zaff 0]

Hi Master Genealogist,

I first of all want to say that when I decided to buy genealogy software in the first place many, many years ago, it was The Master Genealogist that stood out in report detail, not to mention capability. I didn't consider myself to be a newbie so I wanted something a bit more advanced. The price seemed steep for me, but when it came down to a decision, the pros outweighed the con of the price... I ended up choosing the TMG Gold Ed v4.0. I am considering at this point paying the price of the newest v6.x if someone can help me out with insight into how the following below works in the new version. These comments are related to my use of v4.0....

 

Now I have an issue that I would like to know if the newer versions has fixed....

 

When in the Person View, the Flags are on the right hand side, and not customizable in the way that I need them to be. A few examples are:

 

First, I would like to be able to go in and have the default Flag for Living for a new person be Y or Living unless a Death date is inserted at which point the software should "know" to change it to N or Not Living. Now I know I can go in and create a new flag and customize it all I want but then I would most likely have two with the same title (Living) since the original one is not capable of being editted.

 

Secondly, since multiple births are rare, I would like to set my default again at N for single birth. I would rather go in and change the 14 people in my family that are multiple births (twins run in our family) than the 1000 that are not.

 

Thirdly, I would like to set my adopted default at N for Not adopted. Same reasoning-I would rather go in and change the few adoptions we have had, including my own little boy, than the most that are not.

 

Fourthly, and probably the most important, I would like an easier way to access these Flags. Right now I have to click once on the Flag title word to get the "cursor" there, then double click to open up the box to change each individual Flag. I wonder if an update is possible or has been done already that allows changing all Flags for an individual in one open window.

 

I do hope there is someone out there that can tell me that these issues in the FLAGS are fixed already and more readily user-friendly and I will be running to the website to purchase the newest version. Otherwise I will make do with this version until this is fixed.

You do have a great product all around and I do hope this doesn't seem like I am complaining

Thanks,

Melody in MI

[Bob Velke 0]

Melody,

 

I'm afraid that TMG cannot be configured to assume that there is evidence for a standard flag unless you tell it otherwise. The default values for those flags are "?" and that cannot be changed.

 

As you say, you can create your own flag for that purpose. In v6, you can even disable the standard one so you don't have to look at it -- but you cannot change its name or have another with the same name. More importantly (and the reason I don't recommend it), the program uses the standard Living flag for various purposes (like optional suppression of data for living people for some reports) and it will not use a custom flag for those purposes.

 

You can, however, configure a toolbar button to change all of the instances of Living="?" to Living="N" (or whatever). You can run it periodically to update all of those flags at once.

 

Perhaps better, however, you can put any number of the standard or custom flags directly on the Add Person screen so you can see and modify them all at once when adding a new person.

 

To modify a flag in v6, you can double-click on its name in the flag window. You don't need to put the cursor there first.

 

Hope this helps.