Etiquette and Guidelines

Is this an appropriate forum to ask questions that are seemingly obtuse but reflect real difficulty on my part? I have several learning issues that make it difficult to learn and retain Roots Magic programming style of use. The most obvious is memory. So…assume I’m looking at a screen and cannot remember what steps it took to get there and cannot figure out how to progress beyond the screen. This is a not unusual problem. Is there comprehensive, detailed, well indexed reference to Rm9 that does not rely on referring you to videos or support groups? In researching a real question, I ran into this this forum because someone has posted a generic version of one of my many actual questions, and a response was extremely helpful with a link to an intro that was both interesting delightful. Of course I’ve forgortten the user names, topic etc. soI’ll have to do some digging to find it again. Tonight I saw a topic which is squarely on point for one of my relatives. Look forward to asking real questions.

Amazon sells a Rootsmagic 9 print manual. It is usually very small and dim printing but readable as a general guide to the software. Charts are unusable. No PDF manual is available.

@GaryStanfield --a lot of us have problems knowing what steps we took to get somewhere and can’t go on WHEN dealing with a new program…

Beside the print manual-- there is an online help here

If you don’t see what you need, try doing a search at this site-- and don’t be afraid to ask on here
good luck

Selecting HELP from the three-dot menu in the very upper righthand corner of RootsMagic ALSO opens the RM online Help facility in your browser.

@Rooty I was planning on getting a copy - despite the printing. I just hate to buy a pig in a poke, but the RM7 manual is suggestive that it might save me some time for obvious questions if it has better coverage than online help.

@nkess “Help” allowed me to get past the Home Screen - It seems to have somewhat more depth than the older versions. Sales helped me with a puzzling link they sent me “Don’t touch that link.” Support helped with a simple sorting issue “Do this” “Did - Dosen’t Work” “Yes it does” “Honest - it dosen’t” After further discussion, it turned out that it worked from his location in the program but not mine. Other than that, I’ve been able to find some answers through random searches on the Internet. Anyway, thank you for your kind words of encouragement.

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The RM online wiki is still a work in progress and a mixture of version 8 and 9 features. Kind of like using a dictionary to understand a complex paragraph–not much joy.

I’m constantly learning as I’m in the IT trade so I write things down in OneNote notebooks, and often make a list of steps to do something, especially if I don’t so it every day.
We learn from repetition so won’t learn infrequently repeated actions very quickly.

I have the RM 9 book and find it very helpful. The print is very readable. Book is well indexed. Anybody who is having difficulty with RM should buy a copy.

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