Why there is still room for a new leader in the genealogy software industry
Ok, so which genealogy software program do you use? In the last 10 years I have used Family Tree Maker 2-5 & 10, PAF5 and Legacy 2-5. I am now considering making another switch. Why? Well if you've been reading my blog, you'll know that I want to write a family history using a narrative descendancy report as a basis. This led me to discover that Legacy 5 didn't support "real" endnotes/footnotes. I waited for Legacy 6 to be released in September only to discover that it still didn't.Investigations into other software revealed that the features weren't really as equal as you might think. Most of these applications are quite mature and you'd think that there would be little difference between them. That is true to a certain extent when you look at the basic features. But for those of us that are a little more advanced with our record keeping there are quite a few differences.
A search of the internet revealed that all comparisons of genealogical software are outdated. So the table above is my summary of some of the more *important* features and which programs have what. You'll see that no program has everything, even the supposedly all-encompassing The Master Genealogist.
Timelines - show a variety of historical event timelines to put your ancestors into their social perspective
Real Endnotes/Footnotes - create endnotes/footnotes that your word-processing program can recognize
Book Reports - allow you to print more than one report at a time with a single table of contents and/or index
LDS Support - report on ordinance data (such as missing ordinances, import TempleReady updates)
Correspondence Log - track your correspondence
Witnesses - allow you to add witnesses to an event, including allowing your ancestor to be a witness
Gensmarts support - integrate with the Gensmarts research suggestion tool, by making suggestions for individuals that exist in your database and importing the results
IGI Search - allow you to search the IGI and other online databases for individuals that exist in your database without leaving your genealogy software, import the results
Source Wizards/Templates - provide source citation templates (Mills/Lackey) to ensure that your source citations are correct and complete
Anyway, I hope that this helps you decide which program suits your needs. Save to: Digg | | Yahoo | Furl | Reddit
4 Comments:
Legacy 6 does have a correspondence log. Just open the To Do List, and filter it by correspondence. This is the correspondence log.
Hi, thanks for readin. It's nice to know that someone actually reads this stuff!
Hmmm, I disagree with you that this is a real correspondence log. To me its a To-Do item with a type of correspondence. You could create a To-Do "Write to Aunt Gertrude" but it doesn't have any correspondence specific fields (response received, file id#, correspondence type = email or letter, cost etc). The To-Do feature can be used similarly in TMG6.
In addition, if my memory serves me correctly (which it often doesn't these days) I believe there is a limit as to how long the note field can be. This is definitely a problem if you want to copy and paste in emails and other lengthy text. However, I have to verify that this is the case.
I guess I'll have to post a more in-depth review of some of these issues when I get a chance...
I am in the same boat you are... using Legacy, but desperate for the real endnotes and footnotes. I did find I could get them with TMG, but I don't want to switch programs. Legacy said (not a promise...more a comment) that they thought they would add that feature in an ugrade of 6, but not have to wait for a new release. I hope so. If not TMG, then what?? What are your reasons for not using TMG?
By the way... I created a gedcom and opened it in TMG and I did seem to get a pretty complete transfer of data from Legacy to TMG.
So in the end I did switch to TMG. While I did manage to get the real endnotes/footnotes I wanted from the narrative report, I am still struggling with TMG as I don't find it particularly intuitive (Note: I make a living designing computer software).
For example, when printing a relationship report, there is no real easy way to exclude personal events (i.e. a name only version). You can only exclude details for the living.
Also Legacy users should watch out for correct importing of sources and citations. There are a number of bugs and some information is lost with these items. To be fair, TMG technical support was great in helping me with these bugs but I still had to manually manipulate the data so that I didn't lose it all.
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