Register Format using Word

RootsMagic
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1

Here is my problem. I work with original Italian civil registration documents. I always enter the months as full ie, March not Mar. When I use the word document I have to edit the abbreviated months that RM makes to full spelling. An example is November. RM changes to Nov. I have Villanova, and other names with nov. I have March rm changes to Mar. I have names Marco. When I use find and replace I get Marco found along with Mar. Why not leave March as March. It is my understanding that abbreviations are a no, no. RM uses Sep (September) I have Giuseppe, Giuseppa, along with other examples. It looks for part of the work or name. My book is now over 330 pages and that is not counting the index I have yet to make. I notice the sidebar mentions the changes in formatting. What changes are we talking about? Should I be concerned especially if I want a NEHGS approved book.

2

Are you referring to the Narrative report? The Narrative Report in RM8 offers a range of date options including the fully spelled month even when selecting the NEHGS (Register) format. Another option in Word is to use the Replace feature with “match case” option. That might speed up the effort with some of the changes.

1 Like
3

Thanks. They made a significant number of changes.

4

I’m a heavy user of RM’s NEHGS reports. I do not believe that there are any date formatting options that are specific to the NEHGS format nor to any other report format. Rather, the date formatting option seems to be global and can be set under Settings => General Settings => Date Format.

I also do a lot of editing of RM’s reports while using Word as my word processor. As has already been mentioned in this thread, I recommend the use of Word’s Match Case and Find Whole Words Only options when doing this kind of editing. You still have to watch out for things like a person’s name matching a month, e.g. a person named July Johnson or June Carter.

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5

That of course would only be a problem if you were wanting the reverse to Bocito i.e. wanting to change all the Septembers to Sep.

6

And even that wouldn’t be necessary using full month name formats when creating the report from RM in the first place. There are four such formats available.

10 January 1959
January 10, 1959
10 JANUARY 1959
JANUARY 10, 1959

RM has a stated goal of supporting multiple languages in the future. If and when such support is incorporated into RM, it will be interested to see how the support works with respect to dates. For example, some users might really need a format like 1959/01/10 in reports that doesn’t even spell out the month name (or 01/10/1959 and variations such as that).

7

There is an ISO standard for dates, see https://www.progress.com/blogs/understanding-iso-8601-date-and-time-format

Not all countries use them.

8

Based only on reading that article, I would suggest that the ISO standard is not adequate for genealogy.

Here is an incomplete list of issues for genealogy.

  • approximate dates of various sorts when exact dates are not known
  • date ranges
  • dates with only a year, or with only a year and month
  • dates that are based on a quarter of the year rather than a month, e.g., third quarter of 1844 cannot simply be converted to the middle day of the middle month of the third quarter
  • Quaker dates
  • Julian vs. Gregorian dates for when the world was switching from Julian to Gregorian
  • either or dates, e.g. either 7 July 1763 or 7 Jul 1764
9

We need a standard world wide. The variation that Rm shows complicates the matter. One standard Day month spelled out and then year. There should never be abbreviations. I had to stop using a location finder because la in Italian is Louisiana. The word il in Italian showed up as Illinois in the program. We lack true standards.