* Excluding witness sentences from child events in narrative reports

[Peter Collier]

I am trying to to produce an abridged narrative ancestors report that contains only names and BMD dates and places. I do not want any other events/attributes included, nor any witness/informant role sentences. I do want the report to include child events/attributes (BMD dates and places plus spouse names) but, again, without any witness/informant role sentences.

I have managed to get the report broadly as I would like it by adjusting the report options and I have been able to remove witness sentences for the reported ancestors by global changes to the fact sentences. However, I can see no way to exclude witness sentences when these appear among child events, other than by manually overriding the sentence for each individual event, which will be far too laborious. Am I overlooking something obvious?

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[tatewise]

You can make similar global changes to the Fact Witness Role Sentence Templates to remove them completely.
i.e. Tools > Fact Types..., Edit..., Roles..., Edit {blank}

May I suggest a method of making such changes temporary and easily swapped with the master definitions.
Create a Fact Set called say Abridged Narrative.
Copy any standard Facts that you need to adjust into that new Fact Set.
Use the Fact Sets... dialogue to move that new Fact Set above the Standard fact set so it takes precedence and <eclipses> the Standard fact definitions.
Now edit the Sentence Templates in the Abridged Narrative fact set as required for your abridged Narrative reports.
When finished producing those reports, use the Fact Sets... dialogue to move that new Fact Set below the Standard fact set so the Standard definitions take precedence.
The next time you need an abridged Narrative report, just move the Fact Sets again.

[tatewise]

BTW: Did you see the Report > Options > Main tab, Inc Witnessed Events tick option, which should remove them all.

Although, strangely, not all get removed, which I am investigating.

[Peter Collier]

Thanks, Mike.

I had already tried precisely what you suggested, which is why I'm a little flummoxed. The screenshot below shows as an example my global sentence settings for marriage. This did remove the witness sentences from the ancestors' narratives as you would expect, but for some reason they still appear among the reported children's events as shown in the screenshot on my OP. I don't see how that's possible.

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[Peter Collier]

BTW: Did you see the Report > Options > Main tab, Inc Witnessed Events tick option, which should remove them all.

Yes, I have that set thusly also. I can't see any reason why the sentences would still appear!

Screenshot3.jpg (155.04 KiB) Viewed 540 times

[tatewise]

You appear to have deleted the Fact Witnesses Roles completely from the Marriage definition.
So there are no Role Sentence Templates available to be defined as {blank}.

However, the children are still recorded as Fact Witnesses in your data, so they invoked the default Fact Witnesses Role sentences, which are what you are seeing. Maybe they are not governed by the Report Options, which may be a bug.

So reinstate the Marriage fact Roles and then you can set the Role Sentence Templates to {blank}.

How are you planning to reinstate all the standard fact definitions?

Did you understand my suggestion to have a custom Fact Set that allows those changes to be swapped in and out at ease?

[Peter Collier]

Setting the definition to {blank} rather than deleting it altogether did the trick. The amount of time I spend explaining to people at work that blank and zero are not the same thing in Excel formulae, you would think I would have figured that out for myself straight away! Thanks for the heads up.

How are you planning to reinstate all the standard fact definitions?

The restore defaults button worked as expected.

Did you understand my suggestion to have a custom Fact Set that allows those changes to be swapped in and out at ease?

Yes. This report was only intended as a one-off but, on reflection, who knows what tomorrow brings? So, saving it as a set for future use won't do any harm and may up saving me time in future. Good idea.

[tatewise]

There are two problems with Restore Defaults...
1) You have to go through each Fact you changed one by one.
2) You may have altered the 'standard' Fact definition so it is no longer the default, e.g. added a Fact Witness Role or modified the Sentence Templates.

[Peter Collier]

Granted, not always ideal - for the reasons you outlined - but in my particular case there were only 3 facts involved and there had been no prior changes to consider (if there had, I might have been less cavalier!). Nevertheless, other people's mileage may vary so perhaps it was a point worth making.

[tatewise]

Are we agreed that the Report > Options > Main tab, Inc Witnessed Events tick option, does not exclude all Witnessed Events & Attributes from both principal and children sections?

I will report that fault to CP.