This page is a sub-section of the main Family Tree Maker notes.
Article Contents
Reports Intro
Different versions of Family Tree Maker have different selections and formats of reports, available from the Publish screen. Reports are grouped into Collections, listed on the left side – from at least FTM 2011 that’s Genealogy, Person, Relationship, Place, Media, Source, Other, Books. There are also Charts. It is not always obvious where to go for a particular purpose – select a report or chart in the centre of the screen and the description should appear to the right, with a button to start it up. (Moving from Collection tab to Detail has the same effect.)
Do note that as soon as you click on ‘Create report’, the selected report will probably start gathering data. As you may well want to tweak settings, it’s often a good idea to hit the Cancel button (bottom right) rather than wait for the generated report to appear. It is also often useful to have first selected the person (from the People screen) who will be the starting point (focus) of the report.
This page focuses on Windows versions of FTM – some Mac features (before v2017) will no doubt differ.
The FTM Companion Guide (under FTM’s Help menu), ‘Chapter 10 – Running Reports’ is worth checking. Chapter 9 is on Charts. Chapter 11 is ‘Books’ – note that the MyCanvas service has been sold by Ancestry and may not be suitable for those in the UK.
Thanks to the Family Tree Maker users group on Facebook for various ideas and tips.
Note: page started November 2016, more to come.
New in FTM 2014
No changes for 2014.1 (or 2017 probably).
List of Individuals (under Person Reports) has five formats:
- Index of Individuals – all the people in your tree.
- Index of Individuals with IDs – includes Person Ids, Relationship Ids and spouse.
- Anniversary List – marriage date and anniversary.
- Birthday List – birth date and age.
- Contact List – address, email and phone number facts.
You can select All, Immediate family, Extended family or particular individuals.
General tips, wider uses
When a report is generated in the workspace, you can double click on an individual to get a pop-up screen of facts, notes, media and web links (F3 may also work).
Use charts to select people to export and/or delete from your tree. Check the chart has the right selection – you can easily tweak one or two people by clicking on them and ‘remove person from chart’. Once happy, right click on a blank area and do an Export of Entire Chart – do this first for ‘Delete from File’, for future reference or in case of error.
Most reports have an ‘Individuals To Include’ button – this is the same as the Filter you can apply to the Tree view people index (but no option to use saved filters).
Kinship report (Relationship Reports)
includes an option to ‘Show unrelated individuals‘ – those who aren’t related to the focus person. This only makes sense if you also select ‘All individuals. You will probably want to ‘Sort individuals by kinship’ – unrelated will appear after uncles! – just save/print the pages you want.
The Data Error report (Person Reports)
has a range of options of what to include. ‘Errors to include‘ is the first option in the button bar. If you are like me and often have multiple entries for facts such as birth and name, ‘Include only preferred facts’ should stop a lot of spurious ‘baptisms before births’, ‘individual has same last name as spouse’ etc.
Some error options:
- Person is unattached = no relatives.
- Person’s sex is ‘unknown’.
Issues: at Nov. 2016, the unattached option failed to pick up at least one person who had previously been part of a family since removed from the tree. (They were unrelated and she was left as a marker to stop repeating the mistake in future. No relations appear under her Person tab, ‘Detach person’ menu option is greyed out, she does appear as Unrelated in the Kinship report. The file has been regularly compacted.)
Latest tree additions
For reminding myself who has been added to the tree, I have created ‘Person ID’ report, saving the last page or two to pdf (see below). My version is based on starting with the Custom report (Person reports), but FTM 2014 added an ‘Index of Individuals by ID’ report, making this process neater.
You will need to have switched on individual reference numbers under Tools>Options (see FTM support page on auto references).
Changes to individuals – see main FTM notes.
Creating pdfs, text files, other formats
Export options under the ‘Share’ button (top right) are:
- Pdf, often a good format to email to other people, and also accepted by most print shops.
- CSV (for spreadsheets such as Excel or import to databases).
- RTF (rich text format).
- and HTML (web format).
There are similar ‘Send’ options which create an email with the new item automatically attached.
- Image option replaces HMTL – jpg, png, gif, tiff and other formats available.
There are also Windows utilities which create a ‘pdf printer’ – once set up, access via the Print button. You should be able to select which pages to print. The Cutlock computer uses software from an old version of Adobe Creative Suite – suggestions of more current options welcome.
Not just the Publish screen
A neat little relationship chart can be printed off via the Relationship Calculator. Also available on Person/Tree tabs, but lacking the person chooser.
The Print and Share buttons are available in other parts of FTM (in all 5 format options?):
- People – both Person and Tree tabs have various reports – print or share – such as Family Group sheet, Timeline, Photo Album. Print has a version of the Pedigree view.
- Places – Place Usage report. Also print map
- Media – Media Item, Media Usage reports.
- Source – Usage reports for Selected Source or All Sources.
- Web search – print search results may not work, may crash FTM.
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