* Tips from Simon

[admin]

Things have been quiet for a while, so I thought I'd post a few Family Historian tips in case they are of interest.

(1) If you open a GEDCOM file created by someone else, a quick way to locate some key people (e.g. the author's own immediate family) is simply to click on the Record Id column in the Records Window. This sorts the list by record id. Key people (that is the people that the file creator started from) are likely to have low-numbered record ids.

(2) If the author is a Family Historian user you can click on the Updated column to find out which records they've been working on recently. This field will probably be blank if the file was not created by (or edited using) Family Historian, unfortunately.

(3) Press the ALT key while clicking on any column to reverse the sort order. This works in both the Records Window and the Query Window.

(4) A fast way to move around a diagram (Diagram Window) is to press the Space bar while clicking-and-dragging on the diagram to reposition it.

(5) If you don't use your right mouse button, why not give it a try? When you right-click on an item in F.H. (and much of Windows actually) a menu appears giving you a choice of things you can do with the item you clicked on. Try clicking on text (left-column) in the Records Window, or boxes in the Diagram Window, or faces in the Multimedia Window. There are a lot of different menu options. You can even right-click on cells in the Queries Window too, but apart from occasionally offering you the chance to view a record's properties, it doesn't do much. Clicking on the background of most of these windows does something different again.

(6) If you want to delete a number of records, there are a number of different ways of doing this, but one good way to do this is to create a
Named List with an appropriate name (e.g. 'Delete Pending') and add all the records you want to delete to this list. Then select the list and click on
'Delete Named List Records' in the Lists menu.

If anyone else has any favourite tips, why not post them? Quiet times aregood for that sort of thing.

Simon Orde
List Administrator & Family Historian designer

[vliet]

Great tips. Simon. Another comment about the mouse wheel is that (at least on our PC & with our mouse) placing the cursor arrow in the bottom scroll bar allows you to move the diagram left or right with the up or down motion of the wheel.
I bet a lot of people out there know that already!
Regards.
Vliet

[JohnP]

At last - one frustration over.
BUT (I hesitate before nit-picking) in Explorer and other Windows listing utilities this is achieved by double-clicking on the column headings.