Saturday, March 31, 2012

Review of RootsMagic 5 New features – New Source Features


Review of RootsMagic 5 New features – New Source Features

Last week I attended RootsMagic’s webinar on New Source Features in RootsMagic 5. I don’t yet have RootsMagic version 5. I am still using version 4. But I wanted to get a sneak peek at version 5 before I made a decision to upgrade. I wanted to see if the source features had in fact been improved at all. Here are some things I noted about the new upgrades:

  1. You can now hover over the checkmark under the source key to see a list of source names
  2. You can click on the check mark under source box to open it directly. This is probably not a new feature, but one that I do not use as often as I should
  3. Detail text is now called "Research Notes"
  4. RM asks for the name of the source when you are done filling in the source info. It is a popup box. This list is how source records are sourced by
  5. The “Master text” is the information on Master source. Source id goes in first box, ie a reference no.
  6. The “Source text” is the text about the source and comments about the source. Does this show up in footnotes? reports?
  7. “Detail text” is the information about the text or event being discussed, ie research notes, transcription, abstraction, etc. and comments about how it was used.
  8. Each option is now a tab going across the top of the source dialog box (instead of buttons on the right)
  9. Research notes report: can do for person or family (this is the same): prints research notes chronologically for each source and adds the source name in the footnote – I was disappointed to see that this had not been improved. However, there is a new feature called the Research Manager.


What is the Research Manager? - this is new. It was mentioned, but not discussed.

Randy Seaver wrote all about this in his post “Exploring RootsMagic 5 - Post 2: The Research Manager” from Nov 30, 2011. This looks really cool and might be worth purchasing the upgrade.

Have you purchased the new RootsMagic version 5? What do you like or dislike about it? 

No comments:

Post a Comment