Family Historian User Group

From the first version of FH I have always put places in the format town/city, county/reg district, country
With addresses I have used 4 columns in the format house number and street, town/city, county, country
I have found it difficult to sort because the road name is not in its own field/column or when i look down the addresses i find countries in the same column as towns.
I know i can put in extra commas and rectify the problem but is there a quick way of doing this? With over 10000 addresses i need help to put in commas in the right place.
Any help gratefully received
Keir

ID:6647

Have you tried my Plugin Address Summary Report?  But I expect your requirements are beyond its scope.

Keir, I have just performed a similar operation, but on far fewer Address fields.
FYI the Columns I chose were:
1. Name of property    (house, building, organisation, etc.)
2. Number of property
3. Street/Road
4. District/Village
5. Town/City
6. County/State
7. Postcode/Country
e.g. St.Peters, 99, Main Road, Westside, Newton, Staffs, AB1 6XY
Even then I had to bend the rules slightly for some Address fields.

I used Tools > Work with Data > Addresses to perform the editing by hand.
It is not the number of Address entries that matters, but the number that don't conform to your 4 Column format.

You might be able to use the Search and Replace Plugin to make some of the changes.
e.g.
Insert a comma after leading digits of an Address, so the Number and Street are in separate Columns, to allow sorting by Street:
Search For: ^([0-9]-) (.*)
Replace with: %1, %2
Tick only the following two options and clear the others.
Confirm Every Change:
Long Text:
This restricts the search to Long Text fields which includes Address fields.
It uses Pattern matching techniques to find leading digits and append a comma.
i.e.
^ means start of field
[0-9] means any digit 0 to 9
- means the digit may be repeated up to a space
([0-9]-) captures the digits
(.*) captures the rest of the field
and
%1 represents the captured digits
, inserts the comma and space
%2 represents the captured rest of field

Other find and replace patterns may work for inserting commas in front of country names.

Mike,

Sorry to interrupt your thread, but does Map Life Facts still work after you format your addresses like this?

Thanks,

Bill

Yes it plots OK, but a small update is required to eliminate the multiple commas in the output maps, that often result from this rigid column format.

Hi Mike,

OK... thought it probably would.

Thanks,

Bill

Are there any conventions about when to use the place field, and when to use address? I have tended to use the address for the house number and street, and use place for village, town county and country. But having recently swiched to version 5 this may cause a lack of detailed geo-positioning using the map life events plugin.

See Knowledge Base Glossary entry Place and Address ~ What's the Difference?

In addition to the Map Life Events Plugin there is also Map Life Facts that offers more options, including the ability to use both Place &/or Address fields for plotting.
Check out its Knowledge Base online Help Pages for more details.