I decided to try to copy a Census fact using some of RM11’s new and enhanced user interface features. Overall, the effect is quite good and is a major improvement. It’s much appreciated.
Although I’m focusing on copying a Census fact, most of what I’m going to describe would apply equally well to sharing Census facts instead of copying them. And for that matter, most of what I’m going to describe would apply equally well to the copying or to the sharing of any fact type if the goal was to share with close family members. There are still a few rough edges, so let’s look at it.
The Good (almost)
A Copy Fact operation goes into RM Explorer to choose the people who are to receive a copy of the fact. A long term request has been start out by positioning the list of people to the person who owns the fact. My example will be to copy the 1900 Census fact for Alva Edward Peters to the other family member who were enumerated in his household.
It does start out by positioning the list of people to the person who owns the fact. That’s Good (almost).
The Bad
But that person is often not visible in the RM Explorer without a bit of scrolling. Also, the scrolling is fraught. It works ok with the scroll wheel on a real mouse. But if you click on the up arrow or the down arrow on the scroll bar to scroll just a little, it scrolls way too far. This problem has been discussed extensively on RM’s Facebook page.
The Ugly
The right half of the RM Explorer window is still of very limited value. Nothing on it is clickable, for example to select people or to reposition the left side of the screen to one of the family members. And nothing on right half of the window can even be highlighted and copied and pasted.
The Beautiful
But instead of trying to use the right half of the window for anything useful, you can just go ahead and click Mark and then choose the Family option. When you do, a wonderful new Window pops up from which you can choose your family members.
For my own database, I copy Census facts rather than sharing them. But I have worked through RM11’s process for sharing and it pretty much has all the nice new way of doing things as does the copying. The only little glitch is that facts have to be shared with a role, and there is no way to do all the sharing at once without giving everybody the same role. So you have to go back after the initial sharing is done and adjust most of roles to things like Wife and Son and Daughter. This is not new. So RM11 makes the initial sharing much better, but it unless I’m missing something obvious you still have to go back and adjust all the roles.
I will repeat that overall, this new way of copying and sharing facts is a Really Good Thing. It will make my life much easier in entering census data.