I’m wondering if it would be possible to open up the Create Citation Links box to allow creating multiple links in one use, or if there is a part of the workflow that I am sorely missing.
Right now, we can only add new citation links one at a time. For example, if I just created a new source or citation, let’s say for a vital record, I know that I want to link it to a name, a birth event, and a death event, perhaps a residence, etc. I think it would be helpful if, when adding links to people, the dialog box could be simplified to just give the list of all possible things to link this source to. I recognize for Tasks, Associations, Families, this might vary, but I think for a Person, a multi-select capability would be helpful. In my mind, you would have checkboxes to be able to select all of the possible in one window: the Person, any name, any event. A comparable operation is copying a fact to other people - you have checkboxes to select multiple people, you don’t have to open the dialog box each time for a new person.
A second suggestion, irrespective of the first (although if you don’t like that this would help more), when doing any action from a Person window that requires selecting a person (such as adding a citation link), I think I would be nice if the dialog box either defaulted to the current person, or if the person selection window at least started at the current person. I find that, if I am in a specific person, most of the time, I want to do more to that specific person. Whereas coming from the sources list or places list, that wouldn’t be the case.
I’m sure you all put a lot of thought into your UX workflows, so if I’m way off base here, please feel free to let me know.
The workflow you seek doesn’t quite exist in the precise form you describe.
The closest you can come philosophically is to create the citation is first to create the citation for one item - person or fact. Then highlight the citation and go to the Used option in the right hand panel. You will see a list of all the places that citation has been used, which at this point will only be one place. From there, you can Add additional places where the citation is used. But the user interface for the Add is not as straightforward and easy to use as just being able to click a few checkboxes. You more or less have to navigate to each place where to add the citation.
The way to do it that I think is easiest of all the available ways is simply to Memorize the citation once and then to Paste the citation multiple places. The navigation is from the Edit Person screen, not from something like the Add feature I described in the previous paragraph. As I said, I think this is the easiest way to do it that is presently available, but not everyone might agree. Switching around the Edit Person screens for multiple people is not always the easiest thing in the world to do. But for example, you can switch to other family members directly from within the Edit Person screen. The Paste offers you Paste with Reuse or Paste with Copy. For most users most of the time, Paste with Reuse is the best choice. The result is one citation that is used multiple times. And if you need to edit that citation, you only have to edit it once time instead of every time it has been Pasted with Copy.
Yep. Memorize and paste citation is what I was looking for. I definitely missed it in the documentation - it earns a whole sentence on the Edit Person Sources view page.
I still stand by my feature request but this will certainly do.
As far as I know the Paste with Reuse option still requires you to do it separately for each person in turn. That requires a lot of clicking between Edit Person screens.
What we could do with is a “Multiple reuse” option which brings up a tick list of names. Here you could choose the people you wanted, perhaps filtered the same way as elsewhere in RM i.e. immediate family of the originating person, either a child/sibling or a parent of the other possible reuses. This would be similar to, but not the same as, the existing Shared Facts functionality; “Multiple reuse” would allow the same fact and source citation to be created for multiple people rather than shared with them.
It makes perfect sense. But the hard part would still be that you need more than just a list of names. In many or perhaps in most cases you will be wanting for the citation to go to a fact, not just to a person. That makes it hard to come up with even a concept of a workflow that’s easy to use where there would be checkboxes for the people of interest and also checkboxes for their facts of interest. That very real problem is what makes the Add workflow I described so hard to use.
Tools like sharing facts and copying facts now (as of RM11) support checkboxes for lists of family members if you click the Mark Families option from RM Explorer. This is one of the greatest enhancements in the whole history of RM. But as I already said, it’s hard to picture how the same kind of enhancement could be implemented for adding the same citation to facts for multiple people.
By the way, if you are willing to add the same citation to multiple people at the person level and not to any of the facts, that feature was supported back in RM7 and in many earlier versions where it was called MultiCite. I was thinking that a “MultiCite” sort of feature was supported in RM8 through RM11 that operated only at the person level and not at the fact level. But if so, then I can’t find that feature right now. I may not be remembering correctly that “MultiCite” is still supported in the newer versions.
Yes, I definitely overstated - paste with reuse makes the workflow more manageable than opening the add citation link dialog box. But a multi-select checkbox workflow would certainly be best.
Yeah I think propagating citations to multiple people and facts in one go might be bridge to far. I’d certainly settle for being able to add multiple citations for a given source to multiple facts of a single person.
As you have described, you can’t do that all in one go right now. But within the Edit Person screen for a single person, doing a Paste of a citation for multiple facts is not too bad. You only have to do the memorize once, and then you can do separate Paste operations, one at a time, for each of several facts. I do that sort of thing on a regular basis. Lots of sources can be cited for several different facts for the same person.
It does ask you on each Paste if you want to Paste with Copy or Paste with Reuse, and that repeated question drives me crazy. I think there should be two different Paste buttons, one button for each kind of Paste and with no silly questions about whether you really want to do it or not. After answering that question a few thousand times, it gets a little old.
I think that’s a great suggestion. Sort of like how Microsoft products have multiple Paste Special options if you click the arrow by the paste button, but for RM, just have 2 buttons side- by-side.
I did also notice that you can continue pasting the same memorized citation to different people as well, so like you said, combined with navigating to family members directly in Person view, it isn’t so bad.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I was just sure that the tool was still there somewhere, but for the life of me I couldn’t find it. And where the tool is located is actually very logical There is no other place it could really be. Namely, it almost certainly would be under “Tools”, and it has to be a the Citation level and not at the Source level.
This feature has been around in every version of RM I have ever used, all the way back to the Family Origins days (predecessor of RM). A similar feature is available in GEDCOM import where you can add a citation to every person imported that is over and above all the citations that might be contained in the GEDCOM file itself.
Periodically, there have been requests for RM to support some kind of flags to enable marking people, over and above things like color coding and making groups. On rare occasions, I have used multi-cite to accomplish the same thing. I would create a dummy citation to use as a flag, and the dummy citation could be used to find people with Advanced Search or with making groups. But I would only do this with short term projects because it was not possible to keep dummy citations from appearing in reports and in GEDCOM exports, that sort of thing.
I don’t do much of it, but now with the ability to multi-add facts to many people at the same time, I sometimes will add a dummy fact to a bunch of people to serve as sort of a flag. Facts can be marked not to be included in reports or in GEDCOM export. But they cannot be marked not to be included in transfers with FamilySearch and Ancestry, so using dummy facts in this manner can still be a little fraught.
So, just to confirm, it does seem the existing tooling doesn’t quite scratch the itch here.
Can you consider a feature request to create a dialog box that allows for creating multiple citation links to different facts in one person in one shot? It should probably use checkboxes similar to the Multi-Cite or copying facts to multiple people boxes, in order to select which facts to link to the selected citation.
If so, that seems like a straight forward request. If you’re looking for something else, then perhaps provide more detail about where you want the capability to exist.
Ideally, not just select one or more events, but also names, and the person record itself in one window/workflow, since its all part of the same entity.
For me, the most natural way of adding additional citation links would be to add the citations to one fact and then hold Command/Ctrl to multi-select the citations I want to copy. Then I could simply press Copy.
After that, while holding Command/Ctrl, I could click on the facts I want to add the citations to. Command/Ctrl + Shift would also be great for selecting multiple facts more quickly. Then I could simply paste the citations using Command/Ctrl + V.
The last image shows the facts after multi-selecting them.
You are basically suggesting to enhance an existing capability in three ways. One enhancement is that you could copy more than one citation for pasting at a time. I would seldom need to do that, but I could see how that might sometimes be useful. The reason I would seldom need to do that is that usually I enter one citation and immediately memorize and paste it to it to all the places it needs to go.
The second enhancement is that you would be using standard keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste. In my opinion, RM doesn’t do a very good job with keyboard shortcuts. It is much too dependent on using the mouse or other pointing device.
The third enhancement is a little more subtle but in a way it is the one that would be most important to me. Namely, for the most part in RM you cannot simply click on an item like a citation and copy it, no matter how many hotkeys you use and no matter how you use the mouse or other pointing device. That’s because most lists of items in RM such as citations don’t operate like lists in most other software. For example, unless I’m missing something obvious, you cannot copy at all from the list. Instead, you have to click on an item and then more details about that item slide into view. Only after that item slides into view can you do much of anything with it. So right now if you want to memorize a citation, you have to click on it first, wait for the panel to slide, and only then can you memorize it. I think you should be able to memorize it from the original list without needing for anything to slide.
Finally, even if you could wave a magic wand and have your ctrl/cmd+c be supported for copy and ctrl/cmd+v be supported for paste without any sliding panels becoming involved, there is still a problem with the paste. Namely, you always get a popup asking whether you want a paste/copy or a paste/reuse. I have answered this question many thousands of times, always with paste/reuse. I wish there was a way just to paste/copy or paste/reuse without that popup getting in the way.
but this will certainly do.
