I was very use to making editing changes to place records quickly within RM7 after I had imported records from Ancestry, MyHeritage and FamilySearch. I was able to make multiple place name changes/mergers while editing a person’s record. But now with RM8 its become cumbersome. Now it would seem you have to jump out of editing an individual and move to the Places tab to affect merges and then pop back to the People tab and reenter edit mode again and do the same thing over again for each place name changes/merges. I was able to do these multiple place name changes/merges all within the editing feature of a person in RM7. Hope I was clear in my explanation. Anybody else have similar observations and or options to improve these update/editing of placenames. I find it easier to stay on top of Placename changes while I’m adding individual from external sources by editing them immediately rather than going to the Places tab and doing wholesale editing/merging of place names at a later date as it can become quite tedious when you are dealing with thousands of placenames. Anyway just giving my 2cents worth. Back at it. Cheers!
You don’t have to close the person’s edit screen to work with the place page.
My RM7 experience is different than yours. At some point in the history of RM7 and its predecessors, you could make global changes to a place name in the Edit Person screen. But my experience is that the feature was removed, which I think is a good thing. It could be very dangerous. It’s much safer to make such global changes from the places screen, and that’s the way I had to do it after the global change feature was removed from Edit Person.
And as the Rootsmagician said, it’s easier to jump from Edit Person to Places and back in RM8 than it was in RM7. However, to make such a jump, you can’t have RM8’s Edit Person screen maximized. You have to have it “mediumized” so you can see the tabs on the left hand side of the main RM8 screen.
Yes I have my Edit person screen full height and full width except for showing the minimised tab strip to the left. Easy to get to Places or Sources
My experience is exactly the same as original poster, David.
I was using RM7 on a Mac. Maybe Jerry’s experience was different because he has Windows?? Don’t know.
Jumping back and forth from Edit Person to the Places tab, and having to search for the place manually, is still a pain, regardless of whether or not you have to actually close the person’s edit screen.
This is definitely going to put a crimp in my workflow when importing people from FamilySearch, because I format my place names differently than they do.
Ok. I’ve caught where you can find the tab of the original edit window once I had a further gander at the lower tab bar which was somewhat in plain-sight . As for not being able to manage the place merge within the original person edit window and concerns about making global changes I still prefer the way RM7 handles it. A lot less jumping around tomake these changes as it was in RM7 would be better from my perspective even with concerns of making accidental global changes. I always backup my family file once or twice daily so if ever do make a big blunder its only a few hours of effort lost. Anyway just my 2 cents worth.
On a slightly different matter. Can toggle between 2 windows within RM 8? In my previous posting within this topic I indicated how cumbersome it is moving back and for between the Places tab and the editing tab for a person. To be able toggle between with a keyboard short cut might help. Haven’t been able to find a listing of RM8 shortcut keys. Can anyone point me to them if they exist. Thanks.
Hi @djbell73 - the RM8 keyboard shortcuts can be found in the command palette (which is in the top ribbon next to the 3 dots menu on the right hand side). Click on this and it will bring up the various commands along with their shortcuts (if they have been assigned).
Thanks for pointing me to the Command Palette.
I need some advice about merging places. I messed up yesterday, and I want to avoid future issues.
I intended to merge a place named “Jacksonville, Florida”, with another that said “Jacksonville, Duval County, Florida”. For some unknown reason (probably my error), another place “A” was highlighted when I went to the “merge places” screen. I checked the boxes next to the two versions of Jacksonville. I did NOT check the other place, A, not realizing an unchecked place would be merged.
When complete, I found that all three places had been merged and were now named “A”.
Fortunately, there were only 4 times that these places had beed used, and they were listed on the place description. I referred to my old RM7 database to see which places belonged where and corrected them manually.
I am nervous about doing more place merges. I know now to be sure a place I want to merge is highlighted, and not a different place. I don’t know what determines which place will overwrite the other. Is it the highlighted place? Is it the first place I check? The final place I check?
Thanks for any advice.
Moogy
I transferred from The Master Genealogist, but didn’t work with RM7 much. I just got RM8 and I am trying to learn it.
It’s hard to picture exactly which clicks you executed which resulted in an unintended place being merged. But I do have some comments.
The process for merging places in RM8 is slightly different than the process was in RM7. Even though the process is very similar, I think the process is just enough different in RM8 to make the process a little harder and more error prone in RM8 than it was in RM7.
One difference is that when you highlight a place to merge into in RM7 and click the Merge button, the highlighted place is displayed more or less in the middle of the screen halfway between the top and bottom. In RM8, the highlighted place is moved to the top of the screen. The difference is that in RM7 at this point you can see other places both above and below the one into which you wish to merge. In RM8 at the same point, you can only see other places below the one into which you wish to merge. You can scroll in RM8 to move the highlighted place to a more convenient location on screen, but it doesn’t start out in a more convenient location.
The other difference is that in RM7 after you highlight a place to merge into and click the Merge button, the place to merge into does not have a box beside it into which you can click to place a checkmark. It’s very clear which place you are merging into and which will survive the merge. In RM8, the same place does have a box beside it into which you can click to place a checkmark. I can’t even begin to picture what this checkmark is supposed to mean except that you are merging the place with itself. But it seems to me that with the way the RM8 user interface works, if you check that “new” checkbox in RM8 and also check the checkbox for another place in RM8, you can no longer tell which place is going to survive the merge and which one will be gone.
I’m not sure everyone will agree, but I think both these things are problems in RM8 rather than just me wanting RM8 to be just like RM7. In any case, I wonder if these behaviors in RM8 might have contributed to your unfortunate extra merging of too many places.
From the RootsMagic wiki at Merging Places - RootsMagic Wiki
When you have two places you want to merge together (perhaps different spellings of the same place), highlight the place you want to keep in the Places page, then click the 3 dot menu and select "Merge places". You can then check any or all of the places you want to merge with it, and click OK. RootsMagic will then merge the selected places into the first place you chose to keep. All facts using the merged places will be updated to use the newly merged place.
This is the same as in RM7… highlight what you want to keep, then add the others that will be merged into the first selection. But thejerrybran does illustrate in his note above that RM7 handled the process a bit better in that the initial selection was not marked for selection again AND it was placed about mid-list so that entries above and below could be easily seen in order to be marked for merging into the selected place. I suggest that this be a request for change during one of the cleanup revisions.
How are such excellent suggestions going to be collected, prioritised & acted on?
I guess the primary responsibility is on each of us to mark our items with the Tag feature-request. I wouldn’t be surprised if RM staff cull through these forums and pick up items, but they are really busy right now, and, as we all find out, there is a lot of stuff there.
I will try to rewrite this as a feature request.
Well I guess ‘somebody’ must be watching. I just got a System message email “We see you have been busy reading…” after about 30 minutes of reading these queries.
Hopeful?
The Discourse bot is watching 