Peter J Seymour wrote: > I'm interested in what people do on this one. > > Suppose you output a report from your favourite genealogical program > in say DOC or RTF format because you want to put it through some > manual editing in a word processing program. > > What is it you want to do? Is it to tweak the content (sounds a bit > dubious - why wasn't it right in the first place)? Or perhaps you > want to massage the appearance in some way. I've seen various web sites with what appear to be out-of-the-box formatted reports and in many cases they're appalling. The chief offence is to attempt to produce a narrative style report and the result is simply a repetitious doling out of text such as "He was born on 1st of October 1790" whereas "Date of birth 1 Oct 1790" would have been quite adequate and the repetition would have grated less. If you want narrative write it yourself. If want a mechanically produced report go for a simple tabulation. Another problem is poor handling of location. For instance if the subject was baptised in a parish such as Almondbury or Halifax it's folly to assume that they were born there - such parishes include localities miles from the parish church and if the priest didn't note the actual locality it's best not to mention it unless you can provide it from other evidence. It's exacerbated when they go on to say things like "Almondbury, York". I suppose the source of much of this sort of nonsense is relying on data downloaded from IGI and simply loaded into the program without any subsequence editing although in many cases one suspects that the "researcher" hasn't bothered to understand the geography of the area and couldn't have edited it. -- Ian Hotmail is for spammers. Real mail address is igoddard at nildram co uk Ian Goddard <goddai01@hotmail.co.uk>