When I highlight select a person in the Family view under RM7 the person selected would appear in the Index window. This was very handy as I would very quickly have the opportunity to notice whether a person I was editing had a duplicate record listed in the Index window. In RM8 this does not appear to happen. You would have to go to the Index window and search for the person you are currently working on to see him listed in the Index window. This just seems to be an another tedious step thats been introduced with RM8. Or am I missing something. I dont suppose there is a work around for this at the moment if not I hope its something that RM can work into a future update.
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In RM7, the Index tab in the left sidebar tracked with the person you highlighted any of the main views and vice versa. In RM8, all of the main views still track with the person you highlight in the Index tab in the left sidebar, but the Index tab in the left sidebar no longer tracks with the person you highlight in any of the main views. So this is an RM7 feature that is missing from RM8, and it’s a feature that I miss very much.
Bruce addressed the reason for the change in a recent Webinar. I hope I’m accurately representing the reason. My understanding is that the reason is that the Index tab can now be filtered. As a result of the filtering, it’s possible that the person you highlight in one of the main views will not even be visible in the Index tab and therefore the Index tab cannot track the main view.
If that’s an accurate understanding of the reason, then I don’t agree that it’s sufficient reason to remove a very nice feature. RM7 already had the same problem and it solved it very simply. Namely, in RM7 you could filter the main People View and you could highlight a person in the Index tab that was not in the main People View because of the filtering. If you did that, RM7 didn’t crash. There were no bells and whistles sounding an alarm. And there were no pop-up boxes with warning messages. All that happened was nothing. If you clicked a person in the Index that could be tracked in People View, then the person was tracked. Otherwise the person was not tracked in People View. Simple.
I think the exact same very simple approach could allow the Index tab to continue to track all the main views. In other words, track the person in Index tab if possible and don’t do anything at all about the tracking in the Index tab if it’s not possible.
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Workaround is to switch from the Family view to the People List where your new/updating person is listed with similar surnames. That has all the dates/places to help detect a duplicate. More detail than the Index. Better process.
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Thanks for pointing me to the workaround but the option to have the index window while in the Family view would be most preferable. Being able to notice the status of duplicates in the index window while using the Family view rather that clicking back and forth between the Family view and People list would be much more productive. But thanks for pointing the workaround.
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I would vote to have the RM8 index work like the RM7 one. I find it incredibly frustrating when working in a person view and want to switch to another person (example: from the husband’s page to his wife’s father’s page) and can’t do it without searching in the index or doing a lot of clicking. If the index was intuitive enough to switch to another person when you click on them in the person page, it would help a great deal.
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I don’t like the RM8 way of doing this anywhere near as much as I like the RM7 way of doing it, but RM8 does support what you are asking for. Namely, use the top half of the left side bar.
The left sidebar in RM8 is divided into a top half and a bottom half, and you can adjust the split as to how much of the sidebar is “top half” and how much is “bottom half”. The top half has three tabs - Details, Parents, and Spouses. The Details tab is default, but you can navigate to other family members as you describe using the Parents tab and the Spouses tab.
The reason I don’t like the RM8 of doing it is that there are two tabs in RM8 that you need to use for this purpose, and you can’t use both at the same time. And it’s even worse than that because with either the Parents tab or the Spouses tab the children are not listed until you click the Children option. So it’s like there are really four different tabs that you have look at to see everything for the family, not just two. And the list of children view in the sidebar closes by itself when you move to a different person. RM7’s classic Family tab in the sidebar had all this information from all four of RM8’s family tabs available in a single view.
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Yes, this is absolutely maddening. I can’t click on someone in the people view and have them appear in the index anymore. I almost ditched RM8 just for this reason. I research a particular town in Italy where a lot of people have the same names, so need to scroll through the index and people view simultaneously. This makes my research infinitely more laborious as I need to type the surname in the index window repeatedly. How can request return of this feature??