Sneak Peek of Legacy 7 - Part Two

Thursday I went back to BYU's Family History and Genealogy Conference to see the second part of the Sneak Peek of Legacy 7. I arrived early enough to visit the Legacy table and get to check out Legacy 7 for myself.

Here are some things that I learned:

1. Home button takes you to the home person not the Legacy home tab. Many of us older users of Legacy know that you can bookmark the home person on the bottom of the screens and return to them anytime. Well Legacy is trying to make the program easier for new users. They put the home button on the main toolbar with the little house symbol because that is a logically place for people to look for it. Very much like our internet browsers work.

2. The start up wizard is way cool. It will walk you through your PAF import. You don't even need a GEDCOM file. If you don't have a previous genealogy software file it will help you start the process of entering people into the database. It will ask for your name and your parents names and little data on them. Once you finish the dialog it will open up the family view with your started file. It's a very user friendly and smooth entry for beginners to any genealogy software program.

3. Legacy 7 will let you search for women by their married name, even if you didn't enter the married name in as a AKA.

4. When you do any type of search or create a list you can edit and go to the individual in the list without having to exit the list and find them. Everyone has been asking to do that!

5. In the pedigree view if you right click on the background you can toggle between 4 or 5 generations. You can also toggle the spouse and children view off and on. There are several other things you can do when you right click on the background in pedigree view. This was introduced in a recent download to version 6 but I didn't know that.

6. Geoff also showed us how to add the BEPSC temple ordinances symbols to the Descendant view. If you go under options and customize the columns you can add the symbols. That will be really handy for me. That option is in version 6 too.

7. I asked and no Legacy 7 does not support UTF-8. It would take a major rewrite of the codes. They plan on doing that but it's not available in Legacy 7 yet.

8. Yes, you can create your own source template. I just can't wait to play with this animal in my own database!

9. Nothing has changed in webpage creation.

10. No hyperlinks or table creation ability in notes either.

11. I spent most of my play time with Legacy 7 with the charts. I'm not sure how to describe this but the charts are a program within the Legacy program. Sort of like Passage Express is, except you don't need to download it separately. When you leave the chart feature you have to exit it and then it takes you back to Legacy. I was a little confused when I tried to leave charts because I wasn't sure what exit was going to do. Maybe that needs to be a little more clear for users. AND that was the only thing I found lacking in charts. I was just having so much fun moving the boxes around and changing the styles, layouts, backgrounds - it was just major coolness. It is to die for.

12. I asked about New FamilySearch and found out Legacy 7 will interface with it when NFS is fully released. Legacy will just put out a new download for the program when that happens. Just like they did in version 5 when they added the ability to search the IGI. So we won't have to wait for Legacy 8 to interface with NFS.

As a side note I talked to RootMagic and found out that they are not planning to release version 4 until after NFS is fully released. The people from RootsMagic were at the Legacy 7 Sneak Peek taken notes on the competition. For now Legacy is ahead of the game.

Since I was only playing with a demo of Legacy 7 not everything planned was functioning. I understand that many things are being worked on and it is not known if they will be ready for version 7. That is all I can report of the changes in Legacy 7 for now.

See ya tomorrow, for tomorrow is always another genealogy day!