Hi Folks, I’m using RM7 for my production database and testing RM8/9. Quite frequently I have a fact added to a person with a place (city/state) and use Place Details to put more specific entities such as Hospital or Cemetery. Sometimes, I may have the Place, but not the details. Later, I may find the cemetery and then bring up the Person Edit screen, then update the details with the Cemetery for example. I generally place the name of the Cemetery in the Place details along with its address. RM7 has an icon to the right side of that field that you can click and will take you to a Place Details edit screen, which you can enter further info such as GPS, Notes, Media. I have found that RM8/9 does not have that functionality. In RM8/9, there is an icon to the right that will take you to a Place Detail screen, but there is no edit capability. It only allows a selection if you already placed the details previously. So, the net effect is that you have to close out of the Person Edit screen and go to Places, find your city, add your Place Details there. Go back to Person Edit, click on your fact, then select the Place Details. It was far more efficient with the RM7 version than RM8/RM9. Can the RM Company add this functionality back?
You can leave the Edit Person screen open while you go to the Places page.
Not equivalent is it? Count the keystrokes, mouseclicks, scrollwheel spins involved in getting to the Places view, navigating to the Place, (ignore the adding of the new Place Detail) and then back to Edit Person to select the Place Detail.
This is a RM8/RM9 clickiness and inefficiency issue that I hadn’t encountered personally. It really needs to be fixed.
I used to use Place Details very heavily in RM7 and the ability just to add a new Place Detail while in Edit Person was very handy and very easy to use. I quit using Place Details because they don’t transfer to a lot of genealogy software. So I can add my “place details” to the main Place fields in RM8 and RM9 without any difficulty. As I said, the problem of creating new Place Details from the Edit Person screen really does need to be fixed.
RM7 did have one little problem that was never fixed and that seems to be fixed in RM8 and RM9. Namely, while you were in the Place List you could highlight Place Detail and click on Delete and it would delete the whole Place and all the subordinate Place Details. That was a very poor design in the RM7 user interface, and RM8 and RM9 have fixed that one.
Thanks for the response Renee. Let me see if I understand this correctly. Say, for example, I am already in the Person Edit screen and have already selected a fact that was previously added which already had a place defined. I have completed some research and have additional info to add such as the place detail. So far, the process to this point is the same between RM7/9.
In RM9, I would do the following steps:
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Minimize the Person Edit Screen
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Choose Places
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Find the Place
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Click on Details column
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Click Plus sign
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Enter the name of the Place Detail, click OK.
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Now I am ready to enter the data that RM7 would take me to in two clicks.
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Enter data, same as RM7, click check mark.
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Click People
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Double click on the person I was working on.
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Select the fact, click on the icon to the far right.
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Select the Place Detail, click Ok
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Click the check mark - procedure done.
On RM7, it would have been:
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Enter Place details data, click save.
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Click on icon on the far right, which brings up the place details just saved.
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Click Edit
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Enter data, click save.
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Click Ok.
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Hilite Place details, click select.
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Click save - procedure done.
It appears that RM9 has almost double the data entry effort. RM9 has the icon to the far right on the Place Details within the Person Edit screen. The only problem, its been designed for a select only action. My feature request would be that once that icon was clicked, the same RM9 Place Details screen would come up and of course allow a selection like its currently designed, but also add an Edit button, so that additional information could be added such as GPS, Place details notes, media; like RM7. Is that something that could be requested for development?
Actually, after you click People, you would not need to double click on the person. Instead, the Edit Person screen for the person would still be open but would have popped under. You would have to click on a special “edit person screens that are open” bar at the bottom of the screen. The fact would then still be highlighted.
I don’t think that particularly increases or decreases the clicks as compared to what you already described, but it certainly is confusing.
I agree that the functionality for Places Details in the Edit Person screen from RM7 needs to be included in RM9.
Jerry, thanks for pointing that out. All this time I have been messing around with RM8/9, I never paid attention to what amounts to an RM task bar. I guess old dogs can learn new tricks! Ha-ha. Thanks again.
That being said, your comparison of your RM9 workflow and your RM7 workflow is very instructive. I feel like I’m constantly dealing with RM9 workflows that are much longer than the equivalent RM7 workflows with many more clicks and much more mouse movement and fewer hotkeys available.
There was a new feature that was much touted as a big improvement when RM8 was released that you could leave one main tab, go work on a second main tab, return to first main tab, and be right back where you were. It sounds great in theory but for me as a sample size of one it is much more awkward and clicky than just popping up a window, working in the window, and closing the window to get back where I was.
For one thing, you can’t just close one window to get back to the previous window. Instead, you have remember which window it was and move your cursor way over to the left side of the screen to choose the tab that gets you back. I’m sure that just sounds like picayune whining, but in practice it really isn’t. And as you point out, when you get back the the People tab that was open to Edit Person, you are not really back to Edit Person. You have to do something extra to get back to Edit Person, even if it’s only to click on that bar on the bottom of the screen,
An issue that I run into all the time is that I nearly always run a quick one generation descendant narrative report of a person after I finish editing them in Edit Person. All kinds of issues show up in a quick one generation descendant narrative report that are not immediately visible in Edit Person. So I click the Publish tab. I find where it says Narrative Report and click on it. Where is says Narrative Report moves around because it’s on a list of recent reports even though it doesn’t look like a standard list of recent items… I click Generate Report. All is well. Except that even remembering how to get back to where I was manually rather than by just dismissing a window, the main menu of tabs on the left side of the screen is not available.to be clicked. Instead, the Generate Report button has popped up a modal sub-window which I have to dismiss before I can get to the People tab. This means that the next time that I edit somebody and then click on Publish, I’m not really back where I wanted to be in Publish and I have to go through the extra steps in Publish again every time.
I think that if the main tabs like People and Publish and Sources etc. were to be able to be used to their best advantage, they would need to be able to truly be open at the same time - like with People open on one monitor and Publish open on a second monitor. I’m accustomed to using software that works this way where tabbed items can also be undocked. Most people don’t realize it but multiple tabs on a Web browser can be undocked this way into a separate window. You don’t have to open a new browser window in the first place. You can undock a browser window even after it’s created. But the main RM8 and RM9 tabs have the tabbing function and the menu function so conflated that it’s hard to see how undocking the tabs in this fashion could ever be supported. For example, I would like to undock the Publish tab so that I could have it and the People tab truly open at the same time. But the current tabbing system simply doesn’t work that way.