Like you Phil I too have also been using PAF and continue to do so, however when they stopped supporting I downloaded Ancestral Quest which uses my PAF database and I can switch between the two at will. Any information added to either is added to the database. After using the trial version I puchased the full version at the reduced price for PAF users of $19.99. It does everything PAF does plus a lot of additional bits. Worth a look at their site http://www.ancquest.com/index.htm But as you say everyone has their own preferences there is no one package that will meet everyones needs Tony -----Original Message----- From: Phil Marris Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2014 10:29 AM To: sog-uk@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [SOG-UK] Genealogy Software It is interesting, the different preferences we all have. Years ago, I used an early version of FTM (when it was owned by Broderbund) but found the UI rather clunky. I then tried an early version of TMG but found its ranking system ("How confident are you about this or that piece of information?") overly time-consuming for little benefit. I also tried Tree Draw for charts but found it took hours to achieve anything half decent. So I switched to Personal Ancestral File (PAF), the freeware package from the LDS, which I've been using ever since. Unfortunately, they stopped support for it in July 2013 (see https://familysearch.org/paf) but even today, I still think it's a great package. It has an excellent UI, making it easy both to enter data and to move quickly around the generations. The only two reports I need are Book Reports (ok in PAF) and drop-line pedigree charts (awful in PAF). For the latter, I use PowerPoint - by far the best when it comes to controlling the page-layout. PAF's basic "find" facility is easy to use but its complex search facilities are horribly difficult. But this doesn't matter as I have all my records in an MS Access database. Everything goes firstly into the database before I start building individual records into trees. The searching, sorting and filtering facilities in MS Access are exceptionally good. Although now out of support, PAF 5.2 works fine in Windows 7 - so I'm not yet faced with the question of what to migrate to next. Phil Marris ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to SOG-UK-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message