Note About Downloading the RootsTech 2014 Syllabus Materials

The following directions are from Donald R. Snow, RootsTech 2014 presenter and 2nd Vice President of UVTAGG.

UVTAGG: DON'S FREEWARE CORNER  2014-02

by Donald R. Snow

NOTE ABOUT DOWNLOADING THE ROOTSTECH 2014 SYLLABUS MATERIALS

This is a short note about how to download and work with the RootsTech 2014 syllabus materials that were just uploaded to their website Saturday, 1 Feb 2014.  This week, 5-8 Feb 2014, is the big RootsTech 2014 meeting at the Salt Palace and they already have over 10,000 people registered to attend.  I think they expect that number to double on Saturday when they have the Family Discovery Day for LDS, most of which is free, but you have to have tickets to attend and I think those are all gone now.  

The just-posted notes for all the more than 250 RootsTech classes are at  https://rootstech.org/about/syllabus-materials/  and they say they will only be there for a short time from now until after the conference.  You can download the notes for any talk or you can download the entire syllabus by clicking on the AllSessionFiles button.  

If you download the large file, it takes a few minutes and you think your computer isn't working, but eventually you get a zip file with each talk in its doc, docx, or pdf format. Unzip the large file by opening it and copying all the folders to another folder.  You will see that each set of notes is in a separate folder named for that session in coded format.  The note files in those folders are named beginning with the session code, then the name of the presenter, and then further identifying information.  

You can manually move the note files out of their folders and last year I did that all manually and it took me several hours.  When I saw that they are the same way this year, I looked for a freeware program that would do all that automatically and found one.  It's called Suction and will move all the files out of their subfolders and into one folder and delete the old folders.  Suction is available from  http://www.geek-republic.com/software/suction/ .  Download and run it.  It's even portable, so it doesn't need to be installed on your computer and you can even run it from a flashdrive, if you want.  

When run, it opens a small window with a couple of icons.  Click on the little file folder in the upper left corner of its screen, navigate to your folder with all the 250+ RootsTech folders each containing one file, and click.  It goes through all the subfolders and pulls out the files and deletes the old folders so you have all the files in one folder.  Works slick and is quick.  The note on the RootsTech 2014 screen says the syllabus notes will only be available for a short while, so if you want them, download them soon.