Is there any way to save a database in RM 7 for direct use in RM 9? I still like RM 7 and I am on a learning curve for RM 9. So far what I have done is delete the RM 9 file and import the RM 7 file after several additions to my RM 7 database. Seems to work, but there may be a better way.
Initiating the import in RM9 is the only way. The transfer from RM7 to RM9 cannot be initiated in RM7.
I delete my RM9 database first thing every morning and immediately import from RM7 to RM9 again. RM7 is still my production database.
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So the details in the steps are File > Create a New File > Import from …
then follow the yellow brick road.
\s\Rick
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Yep, and ignore that man behind the curtain!
Just curious Jerry but why bother with RM9 if RM7 is still your production DB? How are you using RM9 then? Thx
I’m certain that RM9 (or RM10 or R-something), is in my future. Some external RM7 interface will break and I will be stuck. Also, RM9 is getting new features that I really want and need. So I want to be ready for RM9 when the time comes to switch. Therefore, I work in RM7 and repeat the same work in RM9 on a regular basis. I don’t really try to keep them in perfect sync because it’s so easy just to delete my RM9 database and reload it from RM7 to get them back in sync. I would switch to RM9 today if I could be assured of a clean conversion back to RM7, but I’m not yet comfortable with such a conversion.
I have already changed a lot of my personal workflows to be more in accord with the strengths and weaknesses of RM9, maximizing its strengths and minimizes its weaknesses. I don’t expect to use RM9 just like RM7. And I think I’m getting quite good at using RM9. That doesn’t mean that I find using it to be a very pleasant experience.
I have looked at RM’s competitors and I own licenses for some of them. None of them really meet my needs. My needs include good quality printed reports for a family reunion and WebHints for both Ancestry and FamilySearch as well as a direct FamilySearch interface.
In the case of the printed reports, RM has excellent NGSQ and NEHGS reports with excellent indexes. Reports from other software that I have looked at are not satisfactory. Outline style reports are not satisfactory, nor are reports that carry all children into the next generation. RM’s report body itself is driven by RM’s sentence templates and any alternative would have to support sentence templates. RM’s name index and the place index are separate from each other and are hierarchical. The index is not just a keyword index. Any alternatives which do not follow this model are not acceptable. I can post-process a report as an RTF file in RM7 or as a DOCX file in RM9.
In the case of WebHints for both Ancestry and FamilySearch as well as a direct FamilySearch interface the alternatives to RM are somewhere between one and none. So I can’t see any software other than RM being my primary genealogy software any time soon.
But RM9 has major problem areas when it comes to meeting my needs. The new Family View, the new Descendant View, and the new left side panel are not satisfactory. RM9 is still not stable enough. It crashes or locks up too often as I’m using it. I can walk away from my computer and come back to it later and some sort of error will have popped up on my absence. Data entry takes a lot more time than with RM7. RM9 is clickier with much more drill downs and with far too much sliding with the sliding panels. Hot keys and right clicks are insufficient have often are non-standard. Sources, citations, and media files are areas of special concern as far as excessive clicking and sliding.
Let me use printing reports as one of many possible examples of how much harder RM9 can be than RM7. In RM7 I can right click a person, choose Reports => Narrative Reports and then Generate report to see my report. It will have remembered the setup for my report because I do it so often. I can see the report on the screen without having to increase its size first, and I can scroll the whole report with smooth scroll. I can then just X out the report screen and immediately be back where I was in the main People screen.
In RM9, I can’t right click the person. Instead, I have to move the curser to the far left side of the screen to Publish. I have to find the Narrative Report option which moves all around the screen and which is never close to the Publish tab. It does remember my Descendant Report setup, but the Generate Report button is off the bottom of screen. So I have to maximize the Narrative Report screen and then click the Generate Report button. The report comes up too small to see, so I always have to make it bigger. It’s not scrollable, so I save it as a PDF so I can scroll it. After viewing the report report, I dismiss the PDF Viewer and RM9’s Narrative Report screen which is a modal window might have popped under. It doesn’t always pop under, but sometimes it does. If so, I have to go through the Windows Alt-Tab to RM9 to get the Narrative Report window to appear so I can dismiss it by X-ing it out. But I’m still in Publish so I have to move the cursor from the far right side of the screen to the far left side of the screen to click on the People tab. It’s often the case that my muscle memory at this point will click X again which is trying to shut down the entirety of RM9. I run reports very frequently so I’m very familiar with all these steps. But it’s simply not a pleasant experience.
I would repeat that this is just one of many, many examples where RM9 takes too many clicks or does too much sliding or isn’t able to keep the data I need on the screen all at the same time or doesn’t have a simple way just to “go back” where it was without me needing to tell it where I was.
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Have you tried what I described at
https://sqlitetoolsforrootsmagic.com/database-revert-rm9-to-rm8-to-rm7/
I have not tried that yet, but I will at some point. My concern is being able to do a complete verification of the newly created RM7 database that was created from RM9.
I started an SQLite project to do a table by table, row by row comparison between my RM7 database and the same database in RM9 immediately after an import from RM7. This is like a UNIX style DIFFS utility that does a very precise comparison and is very unlike RM’s Compare tool which is more like a Duplicate Search across two databases. RM’s Compare utility will find differences between two identical databases.
My verification project looks doable. You do have to ignore data that is irrelevant to such a comparison, but it looks doable. Some column names have changed between RM7 and RM9, but that’s easily handled. Ultimately, you need to tie everything back to the PersonTable via the UniqueID field which is certainly preserved in all cases between RM7 and RM9. I don’t want to depend on any primary keys being the same.
If I get my verification script completed, I will import from RM7 to RM9 and run the verification between RM7 and RM9. Then I will use your RM9 to RM7 process to convert back and run the verification tool between RM9 and the back converted RM7. Finally, I will run the verification process between the original RM7 database and the back converted RM7 database. That would make me comfortable enough to convert to RM9 with confidence I could go back to RM7 if ever it was necessary.
My personal history behind this caution is that the last complete rewrite of RM was going between RM3 and RM4. I loved RM4 and eagerly embraced it But several months later, I tried to create a report for a family reunion but was unable to do so. The RTF file produced by RM4 turned out to be so totally different from the RTF file produced by RM3 that my post processing procedure before printing the RTF file for RM3 wouldn’t work for the RTF file produced by RM4. I wasn’t willing to give up several months of work, so tried to back convert from RM4 to RM3 using GEDCOM. The effort was pretty much a disaster because GEDCOM lost too much data. I finally did nothing else for about a week but figure out how to post process the RTF file produced by RM4. I barely got done in time for the family reunion. I promised myself I would be much more cautious if ever there were another complete rewrite of RM. The RM8 rewrite of RM has been a doozy, and I remain cautious. I wish the File => Export Data => Dropbox tool would “just work” to back convert from RM9 to RM7 without needing any additional bells and whistles.
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I wonder if, in your case where you are very much concerned about the design and style of reports, whether a sufficient test for you might be to generate reports from your RM7 master, upgrade your master to RM9, convert it back to a RM7 test database, generate the same reports therefrom and use Word’s compare capability to validate that the roundtrip does not do something wrong. If that test passes, then you can be assured that your lineage-linked data remained intact. What won’t hold up well will be Research Logs and maybe a couple of other not-so-core things that underwent irreversible structural change.
When I tried a cycle of FTM gedcom to RM9 and gedcom back to FTM the result was a garbled file.
Unfortunately, no one is talking about either GEDCOM or FTM. This is a RM9 to RM7 process.
Perhaps as a separate thread - GEDCOM interchange in general between RM and other products and online data services. I’d be keen to understand what others have experienced in the export / import roundtripping with respect to RM, specifically identifying the specific data element data loss / data change. Just a suggestion.
Concept is cycling from current valid master file/program to RM9 and back. Many especially mac users do not use the RM7 windows bottle but are interested in trying a stable native functional RM9.
So FTM still has nothing to do with the process. However, if the Mac users are not going to be using RM7 then they certainly aren’t going to have to worry about moving from RM7 and back. New thread perhaps? That is if you want to talk about GEDCOMing between 9 and FTM…