I share Gavin's reservations about "allowing" software to set parameters, though my solution is admittedly rather extreme. I don't use genealogical software at all. All my data is in WordPerfect, which allows me to record and to format (manually!) pretty much as I see fit. Of course, I lose the ease of sorting, all the automatic functions, the charts, shareability via GEDCOMS etc. And WordPerfect is gradually being pushed out of the market (and so I back-up in Word ...). But given that I'm primarily interested in historical, social and cultural context, I generate a lot of text beyond names, dates and places, and so a word-processor is just the thing for me. I gladly trade the extra work for the control I get. So far,anyway ... Wm in Alberta, Canada