Miranda

But, on the other hand, what if I want to edit an obituary? - one of those great long obituaries which start off with "Pioneer Citizen ... "? I love having transcriptions, and I often need to edit them. Should I have an entire transcription of the obituary in Source Detail Research Notes of all citations of the obituary? I did that for some time. (Memorize works precisely as it should, and it works wonderfully well when first attaching a source to many facts.) In my database it was the Source Detail Research Notes which was the field I did not print. Unfortunately, I make many typos and am very poor at seeing them. Sometimes I make an edit, even though everything is technically okay, because I want to make it better than okay. I make many, many edits. It is how I work. Eventually, I decided to have the transcription in one fact/person/family be the "good" copy and try to remember where the "good" copy existed. This is sometimes bothersome because where I would put the good copy is not always as clear cut as with an obituary.

You are not alone.

I have been on what has turned into a 1.5 year hiatus from doing genealogy because the data entry is so cumbersome. I also make many edits. I just change my mind a lot about how I want things transcribed, which leads to me having to find all the sources over and over and over and over and making many many many edits just to change one thing.

I have been a pretty extreme source lumper for many years, and in general I have been pretty happy with the results. However, in the last couple of months I have been experimenting with going the other direction and being a pretty extreme source splitter - in your terms, "creating a new master source for every phone call and every scrap of paper". I consider my experiment a success so far, but I haven't made a final decision an which way to go moving forward. The thing that made me start looking at splitting instead of lumping is that it seems to me that Master Sources are much easier to manage in RM than are citations (AKA source details).

I always thought I was a lumper until I ran into so many frustrations managing my sources. I would painstakingly use a citation for everyone and then find that I'd made a typo or wanted to reformat the transcription or wanted to attach an image... and then I had to recopy, find everyone who had that citation, delete it, and then paste it back in. It was a nightmare and it actually made me stop doing genealogy over this past year while I tried to figure out how I wanted to do things (and then I did a lot of "got distracted by life" while I was on my genealogy hiatus!)

I am thinking maybe if I become an extreme splitter, I won't have to worry about this so much. If everything is in the master source, then I don't need to do all that tedious finding and updating if I need to change something.

I think they are asking about the external program that Paul Harris mentioned he was beta testing.

Oops! I guess I never noticed it in those before.

I definitely think communication is the biggest problem here. Ludlow Bay calls the tracking system the "in-but-never-out" tracking system. I think that in reality a lot of bugs and features go into the tracking system and are handled appropriately, but some never are and it is the lack of communication that makes it frustrating. RootsMagic doesn't necessarily owe its users an explanation on how it chooses to deal with a given request, but I think that it would be nice to at least get back a "this is considered a low priority but we will try to handle it before the next major version", or a "we have chosen not to add or fix this for such-and-such reasons". Even a negative response or a long waiting period is better than testing after every update to see if your request made it or not, and it gives forum members an opportunity to defend the importance of their request.

I myself am a software developer, but I am also a "customer" of many many software libraries and applications that we use in our work product. Most all of them have publicly available bug tracking systems, usually in JIRA/Google Code/etc, so that people can see what's been reported, what specific issues might still be open but that people have commented on it providing helpful info on how to work around it or how to reproduce it, etc.

Perhaps RootsMagic would consider opening up a more public issue tracker. I think something like that would be great for the "power users" in the forums or people who are used to dealing with such things in their day-to-day lives. I often find it extremely helpful to be able to view this information for the software products that I am a user of. There is a lot of information in the forums, but it is scattered about, and quite frankly, the search functionality on the forums is not that good. I often have to do my queries on Google with "site:forums.rootsmagic.com" to get good results, rather than search within the forum itself.