Family Historian User Group

The issue is that I digged that far into the past that only churchrecords are available and against documents from other sources where birth and death is mentioned, these mainly do contain christening and burial information with dates, thus the visible fields on the indi-windows remain emtpy whereas the ones needed aren't there at all any more, as they were in old v3.

Any idea why these were removed ?

Having noted that the window is resizable now. (Would allow me to see up to 30 children at a time ...) I wonder why such secondary-information isn't simply placed below the main field, so that users could simply resize the window to have them all on screen. There's no need to reserve space to enter data for up to 30 children, believe me.



ID:3640

See [wiki]how_to:v4:property_dialogue_in_v4[/wiki]

for information on how to add the detail tab back or to customise as many tabs as you want with the fields you want.

Thanks for pointing me to that one.

Reminds me to not post lots of issues yet before having read the new features in the help sections completely.

That's on the ToDo list for summer holidays. family + beach + watching kids build sandcastles + .... latop + v4 CD (hopefully arrives till then).
And hopefully I'm a skilled v4 user after the holiday then so that I could use if for my 'real' family-history.

At the moment I'm only playing with a copy of the data using the v4demo.

I think the new customisable Property Box in V4 is great! I've used it to create a tab so I can see the status of some of my flags.

Agreed, that's one of the first things I did when I got v4. And, of course, you can set/unset the flag status from the window too.

Like 'justone' I'm still playing with the demo version. I do like the flexibility of the new property box but there are a couple of things about it that even at this stage I feel could be improved on.

Firstly, unless I am mistaken you can't change the basic colour of the property box - it must be something that slipped through the programmer's net because you can change the colour of just about everything else. On version 3 the property box picked up the colour from the windows theme colour but we seem to have lost that link this time round.

Secondly the way that the box handles alternate names and nicknames is much better, much clearer. However I would have liked this sort of facility to be carried through to handling of all time series and multi instance data such as census, residence and occupation. In version 4 (as version 3) the only way that this sort of repeat instance data can be entered or viewed properly is via the facts screen (or by using gedcom census)and that is just a bit cumbersome when you have a lot of facts to enter.

Lots of other good points about version 4 though, which I am sure will please most people.

Although it's a bit of work you can do the repeat names etc on tabs, you just need to add a custom item and change the index eg indi.name[2]

I think we need a new How To demo to show us all how to do the Flags tab bit. I made a mess of it when I tried.

Irene B

I am trying to customize the property Box by having a flags tab.Managed to get the tab but can't see how to show anything on it,its just blank.Help me please![frown]

I'll have to be brief as I'm supposed to be cooking the dinner I'll add more later.

Customise -> New Tab -> Name it, e.g. 'Flags'
UNCLICK the 'Show most commonly used items'
CLICK ' for advanced users' (for indeed you are now an advanced user!)
CLICK the little right-arrow thingy to send it to the right
TYPE a name for this ROW (eg 'Births')
CLICK Part 1
TYPE a label, eg 'Birth Certificates' (probably best to put the name of the flag here)
PRESS 'Select'
PRESS the little '+' next to FLAGS
Select a flag and press OK
Leave the other settings for now.
Click OK
Click OK again if you have no more to add, otherwise add another ''
The tab will now appear with your flags on it.

PART 1 Items go on the left, PART 2 on the right, if you are happy to just have a list of them, only fill in the PART 1 bit.

Hope this helps, sorry it is rushed, I will edit tomorrow with more steps.

Thanks Jane for that. Now I understand the custom item facility I am really going to enjoy playing around with it. However I am very aware that the alter ego of flexibility is the law of unintended consequences. So I need to think everything through very carefully before I make any changes to my live system.

The biggest problem that I can foresee at present is how to make sure that all the data ties up properly. I don't think that will be easy because, as far as I can see, FH holds multiple data instances in data entry order, rather than event date order. Thus instance 2 of census data may actually relate to a census (say 1841) which came before instance 1 (say 1851). It doesn't matter of course with the standard system because the 'facts' tab converts everything to a chronological order, but if you try to set up a custom tab the display order is fixed. So it may be theoretically possible but not practical.

As I said, it will be great fun playing around with it.

and another one Jane didn't point out, but perhaps that's demo-limited only (hopefully).

If one finetuned various tabs (half an hour or such like), then presses v3 compatability ... the button seems to do what it's named.

It not only restores the details tabs as known (good idea) but also reverted all my fine-tunes tabs to default as these were in v3.

At least it did here. Perhaps a differnt button would make more sense being named 'add v3 details tab', and leaves the others as being set up.

Apart from that misery the concept to let the users define what to be presented with is really stunning.

Thank you, I am on the right track now!

Just an update from my earlier post. I was wrong in my assumption. I should have realised it from version 3 but I've found that Family Historian DOESN'T assign fixed instance numbers based on when you enter the data. It dynamically re-assigns the data instance number based on EVENT DATE order. Thus all data attached to the census in 1861 will be assigned instance (1) if it is the only census data you have. If you then add data related to the 1841 census that becomes instance (1) and the 1861 census data becomes instance (2). If you then add data related to the 1851 census that becomes instance (2) while data related to the 1861 census becomes instance (3). Clever stuff which opens up all sorts of possibilities with the new individual box. In plain english it means that if you want to create a new tab that shows (eg) how your ancestor's occupation, or where they lived, changed over time it is relatively easy to make sure the data instances are listed in chronological order.