Paul I use FTM as well as FH. FH is the main one and the reason I use FTM is because it does provide lots of hot links to people I have on my tree. These hot links save me a considerable amount of time doing a search on Ancestry. Transferring from FH to FTM does not give me all the details. One, for example, is that in FH I set up Project files this is great but the whole of it wont be opened in FTM. That does not bother me as, after all, FH is my main one. I just up date the tree in FTM from time to time. GEDCOM is going through a revision. There is an article about this in the latest Ancestors magazine. I haven't got round to reading it but do know there has been a conference in Salt Lake City discussing changes. It was too long for me to read and digest it all and since I am not involved I will just wait for the final outcome. Genes Reunited do do census but I have not tried it. I think you have to pay for each one you look at. Since I am an Ancestry subscriber I don't need to fork out for this additional cost. Victor On 23/03/2012 1:59 PM, Paul White wrote: > Adrian > > As always your comments are informed and to the point. > > I've absolutely no doubt Simon Orde's GEDCOM compatibility is as good as claimed (my confidence rests in the extremely high quality of FH as a whole, plus my own observations picking apart the GEDCOMs themselves). > > Of course I'm devoted to standards compatibility, and richness within the standard: it was one of just four fundamental factors in my choice of FH (UI, diagramming and queries being the others, and see comment in the P.S.). > > What we need is evidence-based pressure on any product we *really* want to interface with (in my case Ancestry because, for all its popularity and success in finding contacts for me, Genes Reunited doesn't "do" census) in the hope of making life (a lot) easier. > > One route would be for FH to provide a few "dumb" export/convert filters (to FTM in particular) and I dare say Simon would be perfectly able to do this with his existing knowledge, even if there's no chance he'll find time for it - and fat chance anyone else cares. > > Another would be to do it myself! Well, I'm not *all* mouth and no trousers, and i've got as far as parsing a big FH GED into a VBA hierarchy of classes. The next steps would be to output a tree diagram showing the "occupancy" of each element, then compare with other software like FTM. That at least would start to provide the evidence i'm talking about. And be within spitting distance of a filter. But don't hold your breath. > > Paul > > P.S. Too many users are swayed by the fancy stuff, that most software does badly anyway. You can usually find third-party software or a web service that'll do clever stuff a hell of a lot better. > > If you strip out all the frills from genealogy software reviews then (in my opinion) FH comes out consistently on top by a very wide margin. Apart from cosmetics the only issue for many people is "approachability". > > I often wonder if an entry-level interface could be developed to capture a much larger slice of the market, To be honest i don't really rate Simon's so-called "focus window", though it's probably the right *direction* for users of FTM and the like. Needs a sexier look and at least a simplified Properties pane too. > > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to FAMILY-HISTORIAN-USERS-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message