Rootsmagic 3 - A preliminary review

I thought you deserved an update on the Rootsmagic situation as I mentioned a while ago that it was in the mail. I received the disk and manual a little over a week ago and was very impressed with the packaging of the product as the CD ROM is well packaged in a sturdy protective case (albeit oversized like a DVD case) and the book was very professional in appearance.

I have been carrying the book around with me waiting for some time to read it before I installed the program. Yes I am one of THOSE people (gotta read the manual, typical woman). I finally finished reading it yesterday. It was a well written book and only took a few hours even though it was packed with lots of useful information and thorough explanations of how the program works.

I am glad I read the book as I was pleasantly suprised to learn that Rootsmagic has the following features:

- IGI search and UPDATE (Legacy has this, but TMG only has the search);

- book/report publishing center (Legacy has this, TMG doesn't although you can have multi report table of contents and indexes);

- real footnotes/endnotes (actually I was told this and it is the only reason for getting Rootsmagic, Legacy doesn't but TMG does);

- integration with GenSmarts. I love Gensmarts - if you haven't tried it and you don't have Legacy - get it! (Legacy has a similar feature and I am not sure if you need both although I hear GenSmarts is better, subsequently Legacy doesn't have in-program integration although TMG does);

- communication log. I mentioned the communication log in one of my previous postings. The fact that it has custom fields for recording your emails and letters etc is great. Legacy only offers a workaround using the research log at this time, same with TMG.

Anyway, stay tuned as I'm planning a more in depth review/discussion of this program in the next week, just as soon as I've given it a thorough test drive.

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