Family Historian User Group

Hi,

My cousin sent me a Word doc with a slab of text about my great-grandmother. For now I've copy/pasted the text into a Source record (in the Text From Source field). I've seen some posts on the forum that mention using links to external documents, so I'm wondering whether that's a "better" approach.

I tried to find how to make a link to an external doc, but can only see that you would use Add Media to do this. Am I right ... or is there another way to link to external docs?

Thanks in advance ...

Your approach is absolutely correct.
You can attach any type of file as Media but only image files (JPG, PNG, GIF, TIF) will get displayed in Diagrams or Reports.
The others can only be viewed by clicking their icon or the triangular Open in Editor/Player button in a Media window, and in the case of a Word document will open in MS Word or your preferred word-processor.

See how_to:v4:adding_multimedia#adding_other_media|> Adding Other Media for details.

You can also use a screenshot tool to create an image of the word file and add that as an image so that it does appear in reports etc as suggested by Mike.

Yes, that is good advice for any non-image document files (PDF, DOCX, etc), especially if you intend to publish or distribute your data elsewhere.

For example, you may be sending your GEDCOM and Media to someone who does not have a word-processor installed.

Maybe you want to produce a Report or a Book that includes those documents, but only image files are included.

Another option for publishing or sharing such a document with somebody who does not have Word installed is to convert it to a (read-only) PDF. Most people have the ability to read PDFs.

Yes, that works well too in many cases, but needs the PDF file(s) to be sent to accompany published Reports, etc.

Thanks for your quick replies, and I'll be taking up your suggestions.