I am old and tired. Have tried to utilize RM8 (started w RM4 years ago) and find it confusing and rather difficult. Question now is do I go ahead and get RM9 at the discounted price or wait a while. Is going to 9 going to make my life easier or should I just stick with the devil I am already somewhat familiar with? any thoughts on the switchover? thanks
I’d let some dust settle on RM9 before getting into it. Maybe wait for 9.1 or 9.2. No sense trying to learn a new UI when its behaviour will change somewhat over the next few updates as errors and omissions are identified by a growing user base and some get corrected. And there’s no rush if you are comfortable with RM7. There are RM7 features whose RM9 equivalents do not work as well. Is there some new but raw RM9 feature that you really want?
1 Like
havent figured out the differences yet, so think i will follow your_
advice. thanks
If you are using RM8, then RM9 is mostly the same devil with a few added bits and a few annoyances that presumably will be fixed at some point, such as sporadic behaviour with cutting and pasting. If I were using it, I would say go ahead and upgrade so you can figure out if the new bits are worth it. Just make sure that you backup a copy of your RM8 file so that you can go back if RM9 isn’t yet up to your standards.
Buy RM9 while on sale and the manual. 9 is the release version of 8 which clearly was a customer paid beta at least on mac. 9 was released with set of videos and the missing print manual and the interfaces are very similar.
thanks would certainly like the manual
Rooty,
I agree with the customer paid beta evaluation. I think that a lot of formerly happy RM users feel more than a bit deceived by that ploy.
1 Like
Don’t restrict your switchover only to versions of RM. There are other products out there that you could try for free, like Family Historian that imports directly from RM. However, you’ll still have to learn a new UI.
I find that no software is perfect for me right out of the box (remember when software came in actual boxes?). If a program checks 85-90% of my criteria, I can live with that. I can easily change some of the ways I do things to get up to the 95+%.
One thing I do insist on is software that is relatively bug-free. When I’m deep in the weeds researching and recording, I don’t want the program to cr@p out on me.
1 Like
…and certain previously mentioned programs do have a 20% off offer going on during Rootstech…just saying!
New to this. Just got RootsMagic 9. Can’t figure out what to do to start my tree?.
This depends a big on whether you want to start typing in your information from a bare tree or import your information from someplace else. What’s your preference?
Start from the beginning
its in RM8 it will import well into 9 wouldn’t it? no way i want to retype it all
You do not have to import it into RM9. If it is in RM8, it can be opened and will be converted to RM9 format.
However…I would strongly advise making a new folder to hold your RM9 databases and manually copying your RM8 databases into it BEFORE opening them. You can’t go back to 8 from 9. This way you have a separate cope in RM8 and RM9 so if you are not happy with RM9 you can just start up RM8 and continue from where you left off.
1 Like
I think that Bruce just got swamped by the conversion process for 8 and did not get outside developer help (mac especially). He lost a lot of customers who will be hard to get back. Windows users have more alternatives than macs which cannot use Family Historian or Legacy. Our Choices are really FTM and RM9. FTM is a solid program but has a very busy main screen and tiny font. RM9 is still settling down but has a much cleaner less complex main screen with much larger font. Both have good edit person displays unlike all other mac choices.
1 Like
I’m on Windows 10 with RM 8. Bought RM 9, not installed yet. Have also bought a new laptop with Windows 11 which will take over the entire job from the old one which is to be scrapped. Now I’m wondering if it’s best to transfer the RM 8 and also install pure RM 9 on the new one or take it all on the old one before transferring both the RM 8 and RM 9 to the new one.
Set the new one up once properly and avoid double duty. Just install RM9 and forget 8 which is now dead. Only 9 will get bug fixes and it is the real release version that even has a manual (with dim small print).
If you want to use the new machine now and you have access to a RM8 installer, then installing both 8 and 9 provides more flexibility. That way, as others have noted, you can play with the new features of 9 without committing to it. There’s a few bugs/missing things in 9 that I expect will get fixed fairly soon. Until then you might want to stay with 8 as your main db as Ken noted.
type in what you know about yourself, then parents, children, etc.
Several videos here to help Getting Started with RootsMagic 9 - YouTube
I’d recommend buying RM9 now to get the discount, but don’t actually switch to using it until it stabilizes.