Location of Notes in Family Group Sheet

BobWard · Post by **BobWard** » 05 Dec 2012 00:07

I am experimenting with the Family Group Sheet option. I notice that the Notes for each individual appear at the end of the report. I would like for the Notes to appear in the same section for each individual that they pertain to.

Is this possible? I have not yet found a way to create this type of format.

ID:6626

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 05 Dec 2012 09:22

You can do this, turn off the section notes, and turn on Notes in the Main section by changing the field from Hide to Show.

BobWard · Post by **BobWard** » 05 Dec 2012 15:58

Thank you Jane.

That did work, i.e., Notes for the parents now display in each parent's section. But, I found that it also caused long biographies (that I had written as Notes) to appear for each child.

What I was hoping to do is have the Notes appear for the parents, but not the children. Can Notes be selectively toggled on or off for each individual in the report?

Or, I guess I could find a different way to display biographies other than having them included as Notes, i.e., there were some suggestions in a previous thread I had posted on entering biographical data, although Notes seemed to be the easiest way to go for long bios with a lot of personal stories included.

Forgive me here for asking so many questions, but I also noticed that the Notes that displayed for the parents (using your suggestion) were located between the 'Mother' and 'Marraige' lines for each parent. Is there anyway to move the Notes so that they appear at the end of each parent's section?

I did move the order of Notes to the bottom of the Family Member Main Items box, but I find that the parent's Birth & Death rows are still below my Notes.

Post by **tatewise** » 05 Dec 2012 18:38

I may not solve your problems with biographical Notes, but can explain the Family Group Sheet effects you describe.

The only way to include Notes for Husband/Wife but NOT for Children is to use the Contents tab Parents' Record Notes and Childrens' Record Notes options.
But the Parents' Record Notes are always added at the end of the Report.

The Family Member details comprise two sub-sections:
(1) Item List
This is defined by the Family Member Main Items (in order), with each label ending in a colon (:), and its order can be customised.
(2) Events/Attributes
This is defined by the Family Member Events/Attributes, without a label trailing colon, and its order is governed by the Fact Dates and Time Frames.

You could create a Biography Custom Attribute, with a Post-Death Time Frame, then its Notes would appear at the end of the Husband/Wife section after any Death Event.

But as you discovered, both (1) & (2) are included for Children too!

Possible Solution
Would you accept the Biographical Notes appearing at the end of the initial Family section (after Husband:, Wife:, Children:, Marriage), and just before the Husband section?
If so then use Tools > Work with Fact Sets > New and create:
Fact Name: Biography
Fact Type: Attribute
Record Type: Family
then in the Fact Definition set:
Template: Biography: {note}
Normal Time Frame: Post-Death
Then add this Biography Fact via the Facts tab of the Individual and transfer their Record Notes on the Main tab to the Note field of the Biography Fact.

The sentence Template: Biography: {note} will cause the Biography Notes to appear in Narrative Reports near the beginning.
Whereas a sentence Template: {date} would exclude the Biography Notes from Narrative Reports because a Date would never be entered.

BobWard · Post by **BobWard** » 05 Dec 2012 20:42

Thanks for the response Mike.

I have been doing some experimenting with adding Notes under the Facts tab. Have not quite got what I want yet. The font in the Notes under Facts are smaller than the standard text. I know fonts can be adjusted, but I am not sure what format category will control the fonts in Notes under the Facts tab.

Going to be trial & error until I find the right combo.

BobWard · Post by **BobWard** » 06 Dec 2012 03:48

For what I am trying to do, the solution I arrived at was to change parent's Notes to Facts, with appropriate Fact dates to get them to sequence properly. In some cases I had to create new 'Fact' categoies to do this, but given the flexibility of FH, this was not a problem.

I used the Notes box under the Facts tab to enter the text. I then found out how to adjust the font size for the Facts text box in order to make the text match all other text for each parent.

Many thanks for the suggestions.

Post by **tatewise** » 06 Dec 2012 09:44

BobWard (12/05/12 - 15:58:51): What I was hoping to do is have the Notes appear for the parents, but not the children.

If those Facts are Individual then they will also appear against the Children in the Family Group Sheet when those Children have those Facts, which is not what you wanted.
They must be Family Facts to only appear once at the top of the Report.

Also, just in case you may need it one day, check what the Narrative Report looks like for those Facts.

BobWard · Post by **BobWard** » 06 Dec 2012 15:56

Mike,

I am not quite sure what you meant by the following statememt:

they will also appear against the Children in the Family Group Sheet when those Children have those Facts

I did check the layout using the Individual Narrative template, and, you are right, I don't like the way it put sentences together using my Facts>Notes text.

So, back to the drawing board.

Post by **tatewise** » 06 Dec 2012 19:15

Any Individual Fact that you add to the Facts tab has a blue bullet on the left.
If this Individual is a Husband or a Wife or a Child on a Family Group Sheet, then that Individual Fact with its Note will appear in their details.

Any Family Fact that you add to the Facts tab has a red bullet on the left.
These Family Facts only appear in the Family details for the Parents, near the top of a Family Group Sheet.
Any Family Facts associated with married Children do NOT appear on that Family Group Sheet.

What do you not like about the Narrative Report sentence Templates?
These sentence Templates can be customised for various results, or to eliminate the sentence altogether.

BobWard · Post by **BobWard** » 06 Dec 2012 22:14

The sentence structure in the Narrative Report had some grammar problems. Probably due to the format of the text that I had entered in the Facts input boxes for Death & Burial. I had provided a fairly lengthy discussion on the cause of death and hospitalization stay. It was grammatically correct in the text box, but the FH templates could not incorporate that into a proper sentence.

On the other hand, the structure of the same identical Facts in the Individual Summary report & the Family Group Sheet worked perfectly.

Still trying to sort out the best way to get biographies to display in an acceptable sequence for some of the report templates. We had a lengthy discussion on that in a previous thread.

There are just a lot of options to experiment with. I will probably have to settle for some compromise, i.e., I do not think a single text input format is going to work for all the different report options. I will probably have to set it up to work for the report options that I will use most and then just accept that other report options will not be usable without going back and reformatting everything.

From my perspective, what I would like to have is the ability to put all this text on a person's life into multiple Notes and then have a mechanism to control the order in which the Notes appear in various reports. Let the user set up the grammatical structure & sequencing instead of FH.

I have only been using FH for about 3 weeks, but it is beginning to look like the program is trying to force too much automation (my personal opinion only) of how reports are generated. I realize there is a lot of program flexibilty, and I certainly have a lot more to learn, but it would be nice to have a little more freedom in how we enter and control the appearance/sequencing of text discussions on various life stories and events in a person's life. Maybe that option is there and I just have not found it yet due to my newness to FH.

I really do like FH. I took test drives on Legacy, Roots Magic, and Ancestral Quest and concluded that FH was clearly a better genealogy program. Took a peek at Family Tree Maker, which also looked good, but read several reports about program bugs.

Really appreciate all the very helpful comments this forum provides.

Post by **tatewise** » 07 Dec 2012 10:13

Narrative Report Sentence Templates
These only apply to Narrative Reports so any changes to them will not affect any other Reports.
The sentence Template in the Fact Definition is just a default, and if carefully crafted, should fit most, if not all, the Facts of that type.

But if there are a few Facts that are poorly worded using this default Template, then they can be overridden individually.
Click in the Sentence box of the offending Fact and the Template is revealed.
You can edit the Template until the wording is just right for that Fact alone, without affecting any other Fact.
If you need to reset to the default Template, then delete the box contents entirely, and the default will be restored automatically.

There are several Wish List items to improve Templates:
251: Option to insert new paragraph marker in Fact Set Sentences
275: Combined events in narrative reports
357: Allow sentence templates to accept data expressions and functions

Other Reports
I suspect you have found most of the Report Options available.
Yes, the Reports have many components of their style predefined, and a more generalised Report Writer is probably the only way forward.

Some users save the FH Reports in Word-Processor RTF format and post-edit them using a Word-Processor such as MS Word or OpenOffice.

BobWard · Post by **BobWard** » 07 Dec 2012 16:45

Mike,

I will have to play around with the sentence templates for the Narrative Reports and see what I can do. If I do make sentence template chages then it will require some very standardised text entries to make sure that everyone's Narrative report reads grammatically correct. I did a little bit of this yesterday and did make some improvements, but still encountered a few small glitches in sentence structure.

'Some users save the FH Reports in Word-Processor RTF format and post-edit them using a Word-Processor such as MS Word or OpenOffice.' This is an interesting statement. You are saying that I can create the report in FH then save it as an RTF file which I can then open in MS Word. Then I can edit to my hearts content. Yes, that will take some time, but it might be worthwhile to get everything just the way you want it before publishing a book to distribute to family members. Thanks for that tip, I will experiment with that concept.

It is an admirable goal that FH tries to automatically format everything for us in our publications, but in reality a very difficult goal to achieve with 100% satisfaction for all users. But even it it might fall short now & then, it certainly provides an excellent starting point should we elect to go the RTF route with MS Word.

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