RootsMagic 10 includes lots of wonderful new features that have long been wished for. I therefore hate to complain about any of them. But here goes anyway for the new Copy Fact feature.
My current use case is to use the new Copy Fact feature to add a census fact to everyone who was enumerated in the same family in the census. My test case is the following census entry. I should mention that the census enumerator misspelled the surname as Peaters rather than as Peters, but that has no impact on the issue with RM’s new Copy Fact feature.
My current process for entering a census entry into RM is to enter a complete census fact for the head of household, including date, place, note, citation, and media file. Then I do a very manual “copy fact” process to copy this information into a new census fact for all the other family members. I create a census fact for the other family members. I copy and paste the census note to the census fact for the other family members. I Memorize and Paste the census citation to the census fact for the other family members. I memorize the file name for the media file then do an Add Media => Select Existing Media for the census fact for the other family members. I do choose to customize the census note a little bit for each family member, but it’s much easier to paste the note from the head of household and customize it a little bit than it is to type the census note in from scratch for each family member.
It seems obvious that using the new Copy Fact feature to copy the census fact from the head of household to each family member and then doing the census note customization should be much easier and faster than my current manual process. But so far, it hasn’t seemed much faster. The sticking point is that you can’t memorize the fact and then go to each family member in turn and paste the fact. Instead, the workflow is to use the new Copy Fact feature in Edit Person. From there, you use RootsMagic Explorer to mark each person who is to receive the copied fact. The hard part for me with the census fact is marking the family members who are to receive the copy of the census fact.
On its face, the use of RootsMagic Explorer to mark each family member who is to receive the census fact doesn’t seem like any big deal. And in fact, it’s a great procedure if you have a fact that you wish to copy to hundreds or even thousands of people. You can simply Mark people using criteria for the people to be marked. But it seems to me that RM10’s version of RootsMagic Explorer doesn’t really support navigating from family member to family member in the same family to mark each family member in turn. That is the source of the problem of using Copy Fact to add a census fact to everyone in the census entry. If family member to family member navigation were supported adequately by RM10’s RootsMagic Explorer, then adding census entries to an entire family using the new Copy Fact feature would be easy and would be great for adding census facts to an entire family.
In my testing, I have made a copy of my production RM10 database. In the test RM10 database, I have deleted the 1910 census fact from all the family members in the Alva Peters family except for Alva himself. I am then using the new Copy Fact feature to copy Alva’s 1910 census fact to every one else. I almost need a video to show the problem, but let’s see if I can show the problem without a video.
After initiating the Copy Fact feature, here is what I first see.
That’s not too bad. I’m copying the Census fact for the head of household who was Alva Peters. It has pre-positioned to Alva. It also has highlighted Alva. However, the highlighting is very weak and hard to see. And Alva is at the bottom of the RootsMagic Explorer panel instead of at the top where he needs to be. Those are relative minor issues. The real issue is that I now need to start marking other family members, for example let’s start with his mother. How do I do that? Well I start by clicking the Parents tab in the right hand panel. And there she is.
But I can’t mark her by clicking on her or anything like that. The only way to mark her is to type her name or her ID number into the search box. So that’s what I’m doing, and I have to do it for each family member. That’s what I mean by RM10’s RM Explorer not supporting navigation from family member to family member. You actually see all the family members. But you can’t mark the family members you are seeing. I think that what’s needed instead is for the right hand panel of the RootsMagic Explorer screen to look something like the following. Please forgive my meager artistic skills in making check boxes that are properly sized and which are lined up correctly.
In addition to having check boxes, the names in the right hand panel should actually be clickable and when clicked should position the highlight to that person in left hand panel.
In general, the right hand panel of the RootsMagic Explorer screen - the panel with the Details tab, the Parents tab, and the Spouses tab - is one of RM10’s weakest features. I think it would benefit greatly by looking instead more or less like my mockup.
I’m sure someone is going to suggest the feature in RootsMagic Explorer where the Mark dialog supports marking families. The problem is that it marks everybody in the family - either spouse and children or else parents and siblings. That’s marking too many people because not all of the people in the family are necessarily in the census. People in the families could be born after the census or have died before the census or could have married and left the nuclear family before the census. So you really do need check boxes where you can pick the family members who are to receive a copy of the census fact.
Finally, the Copy Fact feature should not be hidden behind the 3 Dots icon. Instead, it should have its own icon, viz.
rather than the following as it is now.
