Here are the steps I took (Windows 10, RootsMagic 9), but I have questions about what to do:
Publish > All Reports and Charts > Custom Report
Report: Create or select report
Not sure what I’m supposed to do there.
Include? Click “Everyone” and a box opens. I’m not able to read anything below “Select people” - supposedly due to having font scaling set at 132% (under Settings > Display Settings). I have already reported this a while ago and was told to drag the window so more text shows. I did that but the program does not remember it for the next time. That seems to be a bug.
Click the arrow.
Click “Select from List”
Click “Mark”; click “By data fields”
“Select field” choose “Date edited” is after 01 Jan 2023
and
“Select field” choose “Date edited” is before 19 Dec 2023
Click OK
Marked 2890 people.
OK
Now do what? Options are to Select or Cancel.
At what point do I Generate Report?
Running a Custom Report is a two step process. That can be very confusing the first time you run a Custom Report. In a certain sense, the steps can be accomplished in either order.
One of the steps is to define the format of the report. This means defining columns for your report because a Custom report has columns and rows like a spreadsheet. You typically define columns like the person’s name and birth date and death date or something like that. But there are a gazillion options for what the report contains. It sounds like you want one of the columns to be the date edited.
The other step is to define which people you want in the report. This is the step you have been working on where you want people who were edited between 1 Jan 2023 and 19 Dec 2023. Picking the people for the report is essentially the same thing as picking the rows for the report, one row per person. But picking the people won’t do anything unless you have defined the columns for the report, and picking the columns won’t do anything unless you have selected the people.
The design of the Custom Reports tool is such that when you save a report, you are only saving the column definitions. This is by design. It allows you to pick the columns for the report and then to run that same report against different selections for the people.
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Yes, it’s very confusing. I have now watched part of a video
Bruce’s menu items at the top do not look like what I’m seeing in RM9.
I added some text for the columns:
When I clicked OK, then “Cancel” (Custom Reports window) then “Generate Report” I see nothing in the report.
It doesn’t seem normal to click Cancel having just Marked people. In any case, it’s not working for me.
See if this helps. It’s a video that’s 2:45 in length for a very simple custom report.
Making and Running a Very Simple Custom Report
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Thanks, Jerry! That helped and I now was able to generate a report.
You are most welcome.
To keep my video simple, I left out things like how to make a report with more than two columns or how to adjust the width of the columns or how to put labels at the top of each column. But those are easy things to do after you get the basic concept. The basic concept is the tricky part.
In the video I chose my people by using a group. You don’t have to do it that way. There’s in option when you are running the report to select the people from there. I personally prefer to have groups because once I have made a group I can use it over and over again without needing to select the same people over and over again. But sometimes when you are just running a report against a list of people one time it might be easier to make the list of people as you are running the report instead of by making a group.
The only other thing to mention at this point is that you don’t have to save the report as a PDF to be able to view it. You certainly can just use RM’s report viewer instead. I personally just find it easier to view reports from RM9 in a PDF viewer than in RM’s report viewer…
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I did all that. I tried it on both of my computers (Mac-main and Windows11 laptop). In the reports, it keeps putting the year 2021 at the top and years 2023-2026 at the bottom. Shouldn’t 2026 be at the top of the report. I have sort by “date edited” in the report settings.
Have you checked what is entered in the Header/Footer?
This is the report in the report designer. Here is the screen shot.
I saw on another thread that you are referring to the sort order of the date edited. Click on the gears icon in the upper left and select Date Edited under Sort by. It will sort in chronological order.
I did do that. It seems to me, that RM11 puts the latest edited date at the bottom instead of the top like I thought it would.
RM11 is working correctly and as designed in this regard. All previous versions of RM worked the same way when it came to sorting Custom reports.
But there is a missing feature. Namely, you can sort by multiple columns, but all sorts are ascending. For character data such as names, that means the sort is in alphabetic order. For data that is dates, that means that the sort is from the earliest date to the latest date.
The missing feature is the ability to sort a column in either ascending or descending order. If that feature were available, you could set the Edit Date column to sort descending. That in turn would put the newest dates first (the “largest” dates) and the oldest dates last (the “smallest” dates). So we should make this into a feature request.
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I am learning that RM11 works differently then I expected. I was never much to do reports until recently. That would be a nice feature, is RM could add it in. Sure would make me happy.
Confirming request has been reported to development.
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