I finally did an episode on GRAMPS on the Genealogy Software Showcase. My goal was to do a balanced demonstration for beginners, not a tutorial. I know people here feel strongly about it, so hopefully, you find it fair.
Ed Thompson is presenting Gramps on Genealogy Software Showcase YouTube channel. Ed does his baseline example of adding 3 generations by hand, seeing what basic options are supported for names, relationships, dates & places.
His takeaway? Gramps is easy to use⌠once you know how to use it.
Thatâs fair. The GUI elements to do a lot of basic things are not necessarily intuitively placed or represented. The beginner option (where the GUI elements have text labels and take up extra screen space) is not a default because it was added recently in response to a user request. But what seems to be the standard workflow begins to make sense⌠after a while.
⌠Then two years later, you find youâve been doing everything the hard way! There are usually multiple ways of doing things and when you find the one that suits YOUR workflow, suddenly Gramps makes sense to you.
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From the thread started a couple days ago by Dale
Maybe we should list the sticking points and note how much each consumed in a 57 minute review:
25 Sep 2024 Fixed Featuring GRAMPS Features! cross-linking with Episode 7:Discovering Free Family History Software
Dashboard
- [2:58-3:45] Not obvious how to get back to changing column layout (He expected it to be in Edit â Preferences, not View â Config. Maybe add item to Gramplet select pop-up Context menu?)
- [36:45-38:55] needed a user prompt when no Gramplets are displayed [30:06-33:10] Played with Dashboard Viewâs Gramplet configurations, left the Dashboard View blank when sidetracked to the Places View find the PlacesCleanup Gramplet. He attributed the blank Dashboard to quirkiness.
Confusions
- [6:21-6:36] Expected to be able to Add objects via the Object summary Gramplets in the bottombar.
- [9:52-11:26] Couldnât find his preferred date format (Just missed the option. The preferred format was there but maybe he was expecting to see âdd mmm yyyyâ instead of âDAY MON YEARâ). He also questioned the need to restart Gramps for a Date format change.
- [14:38-15:12] he found the Relationship view disorienting because the Active Person was at the top and among the Siblings (He thought felt âSiblingsâ should be Children because of the inclusion of the Active Personâs Self & the Parents placed above ⌠yet below the Active Person. I love that Gramps represents the Active Person among the siblings & in their birth order. It keeps me from forgetting to include them when listing all the sibs. Their omission from context in FindAGrave, WikiTree, MyHeritage, and other programs always costs time to compare birthdates & determine where the focal person fell in the birth order. Perhaps the display would have been less ambiguous if there had been an actual spouse & offspring. Then less clear again if the View had multiple spouses or a step/foster/adoptive parents in addition to biologicals.)
- [19:45-21:52] Found it odd that an Event in the process of being added via the Person editor or Family editor did not list in Participants column prior to committing with the Editorâs OK. (Maybe some sort of âpendingâ indicator would have helped? Feature Request 13533 filed.)
- had trouble with a couple Gramplets
- [36:15-39:32] installed the Person Overview addon & couldnât find it in the interface because, although labeled with a Category name, it isnât clear that the Gramplet registration NavType limits it to Person views, and the Gramplet is called âOverviewâ in the GUI, not âPerson Overviewâ as it is listed in the Plugin Manager. Unfortunately, the Help button in the detached gramplet goes to the generic Gramplets documentation, it is not listed in the Add-ons list and there is no wiki page.
- [39:28-48:15] Gramplet with fixed size (PlaceCleanup) on the Bottombar needed a vertical slider indicator of off-screen controls The layout was designed for the Sidebar rather than the Bottombar where he added it.
- [45:07-46:55] Internally Searching the wiki for an add-on didnât find it in the 1st attempt⌠even when knowing the (Place Cleanup) name. He resorted to using Google externally.
Oddities:
- [18:07-21:52 and 28:09-29:27] Created a Marriage Event for a family, it showed them as main participants in the Events view but omitted that Event from the horizontal pedigree chart. It was also missing from the Family event. (Perhaps he did an Undo, canceled or used the Close gadget on the Edit Family dialog?) Eventually used the Share to re-attach the Marriage Event.
Caveats:
- [5:14-5:45] Noted his accidental entry of surnames in the prefix field.
- He invested over 2 weeks of preparation for this presentation while spending 1 week or less for others. (Noting that this presentation is strictly about adding 3 generations manually. This includes checking the flexibility in name, relationship, date & place entry.)
- You can read Edâs early questions (from July 2020) to the community as he planned this review.
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@Nick-Hall
There is no âauthorâ or âmaintainerâ for the Person and Family Overview gramplets. But you are listed for the .gpr.py 2013 copyright. (2013-2016 in the module)
Thereâs no README.md in the addons-source/overview repository.
I cannot tell what records drive the Grampletâs blank columns. (Could the sporadically filled âAgeâ column have been impacted by the new âAge display precisionâ data tab preference?) So I cannot generate the missing Addon:Overview wiki target page or a row entry in the 3rd-party 5.2 addons table.
The undocked gramplet have no indicator of what type of record (Family or Person) provides the context.
The content doesnât make sense for the Family Event Overview. Are the (age, where born, condition, occupation, residence) column related the Father or Mother? For the Person Event Overview, is this data supposed to come from Form data?
The strange âAgeâ column exists in the standard Events gramplet (wiki) for Families too.
Ed Thompsonâs difficulty finding his preferred Date Format was predictable and avoidable. The naming of the formats is obscure and atypical.
LibreOffice Calc sidesteps the trap of format names by just showing a date in various formats. You can still see the âFormat Codeâ by selecting a sample date. (Oddly the âEnglish (USA)â in Calc does not offer a âD MMM YYYYâ format, only a âD MMM YYâ. So Genealogists in US would have to either change Language or add a âuser-definedâ format.)
Perhaps the Gramps Preferences menu could just append a sample date for each menu option. submitted 0013396: Need immediate Feedback of Date Format since it is a âRestartâ preference
For example in the following Preferences screen capture, the birthdate of Gramps (21 April 2001) is shown to the right of the currently highlighted selection in the date format. (I considered suggesting today() â but that might have a confusing example date ⌠where the day might be 12 or less. Leading to confusion about which number is the month and requests for leading zero options.) The options in the Age display precision could similarly show Gramps formatted age as of today().
Note that the DAY MONTH YEAR and DAY MON YEAR date format options are misleading. They do not render the month name or abbreviation in UPPER CASE, they use Mixed/Camel Case. See Pull Request 1753 in Master branch
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Ed Thompson did another 1:01:47 Genealogy Software Showcase video called âHow-to create webpages with your desktop genealogy program. Is it really this easy?â.
It was produced a couple weeks after the Gramps presentation (about 1 Apr 2021) and adresses generating static genealogy websites. After the introduction using RootsMagic, he covers similar data generated from the other 4 Genealogy packages:
| Genealogy Software | start time | end time |
|---|---|---|
| RootsMagic 7 | 00:37 | 26:30 |
| Family Historian 7 | 26:51 | 36:15 |
| Legacy Family Tree 9 | 36:19 | 43:40 |
| Gramps 5.2 | 43:40 | 51:24 |
| Ancestral Quest 16 | 51:22 | 55:37 |
This showcase is concluded by a brief comparison of the Ancestor pages for the 5 genealogy tools. (He could not find something comparable for Gramps.)
For Gramps, he also lists the addon Dynamic Web Report but only covers the built-in Narrative (Narrated) Report.
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