Page 123 of the Roots Magic 9 book says this: “Tip: To quickly edit a fact note, just click your mouse in the note column of the fact list next to the desired fact.” There are six columns next to the facts. If I put my cursor on one of the column headings it doesn’t show what the column is for. I have to click on the line below which goes with my fact, which is cumbersome and, as far as I can tell, none of them are for adding notes to a fact. (In my case it’s a birth fact.) Nor can I find a picture in the book which shows what the column headers mean. (I’m using Windows 11.) What am I missing?
I feel dumb, I’ve just discovered that the first column is the note column. But why can’t I learn this by putting my cursor on the column heading?
I’m trying very hard not to yearn for the good ol’ days of RM 7, but it’s hard.
Just as a heads up:
There’s also another way to get there in the Person Items section of that screen:
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You’re right, but when you’re looking at a fact, the “Person Items” space is occupied by a Sentence.
SO you are looking for a tool tip to tell you what the column is? To the best of my knowledge, no recent version of Rootsmagic has done this. This assumption seems to have always been that you could figure it out from the icon at the top of the column.
Well… yeah. It’s a line item NAMED Note… with THE first sentence shown, IF one has already added to a BLANK note. THEN you can just hover your pointing device over that sentence and a tool tip opens to show contents OR click on the sentence to OPEN that note for edit/addition.
I’m a critic of the RM9 user interface as compared to the RM7 database, but it seems to me that the way you get into the note editor for a fact is pretty much the same for RM9 as compared to RM7. Neither one of them provide a tool tip on a hover over.
It seems to me that RM7’s icons for facts in the Edit Person screen do have a very slight advantage over the same icons in RM9 because the RM7 icons themselves are a little easier to understand than the RM9 icons.
- RM7’s icon for a note is much more expressive than is RM9’s icon for a note. I would never guess just by looking that RM9’s icon for a note is an icon for a note.
- RM9’s icon for sources is more expressive than is RM7’s icon for sources, so we give credit to RM9 where credit is due.
- RM7’s icon for media files is much more expressive than is RM9’s icon for media files.
- RM7’s icons overall are just much easier to see than RM9’s icons. RM7’s icons have better colors and especially they have better contrast. I find poor color choices and lack of contrast to be problems throughout RM9’s user interface. It’s trying to be too modern for its own good.
I can certainly see why new users have difficulty in navigating those columns to the right of the fact line. It would be a simple enhancement to include tool tip messages on each of the column icons to help new users.
One would think, but for some reason I seem to recall the Mac method of doing this is somewhat different than the Windows version. Given that certain things are not available in the Windows version because the Mac version isn’t there or varies a lot, I wouldn’t expect to see tooltips any time soon.