Please be wary if you are tempted to order Family Tree Maker 2008 on the Ancestry (USA) website in response to an e-mail. The $39.95 does not include the $13 international shipping charge which you do not see until after you have entered your card details. Also, the package is likely to be subjected to 15% VAT on the $52.95 when it enters the UK because it is over the £18 threshold, and there will also be a £4.50 Royal Mail charge for collecting the VAT, plus a trip to Royal Mail to collect the package and pay the VAT and the £4.50. Our price for the UK Edition is only £19.50 with free delivery which is about £15 less than the total USA price for the USA Edition.
Family Tree Maker 2008 has been totally rewritten from the ground up. There is no code from previous versions in FTM 2008. Family Tree Maker 2008 should be regarded as a new program rather than an upgrade from previous versions. Family Tree Maker 2008 sports a completely redesigned interface and database that makes it easier to enter, view and edit information. The Check For An Update facility in the Help menu is expected to provide free downloads of more features over the coming weeks and months (you will receive automatic notification of program updates if you opt for "Automatically check for program updates when connected to the internet" option in the Tools menu - Options). The new programing code allows for optional plug-in extra features that may be provided by third parties in the future.
Workspaces
There are seven areas or workspaces within Family Tree Maker 2008 -- Plan, People, Places, Media, Sources, Publish, and Web Search. The Menu items are: File, Edit, View, Source, Tools, Help. All of the areas except for Plan have resizable panes that may be dragged or collasped. Person Notes, Fact Notes, Source Notes and Media Notes can all be formatted and privatised.Plan
Plan is the area that you see when you start Family Tree Maker 2008. There are options to create a new tree (previously called family file) from scratch or to import data from any of these sources- Family Tree Maker .ftw or .fbk family files created by any previous version (including all versions of Family Tree Maker published by Banner Blue or Broderbund or The Learning Company or Mattel or Genealogy.com or Ancestry.com or Ancestry.co.uk or The Generations Network or GSP or Encore or Mindscape)
- GEDCOM files
- Personal Ancestral File (PAF)
- Legacy Family Tree
- The Master Genealogist
People
A new People interface that combines elements of a pedigree chart and a family group sheet. The Family tab of the People view is the main working area of Family Tree Maker 2008; combining the old family card, family view, pedigree view and editing areas, all into one single screen that is far more intuitive and much easier and faster to use. The editing area is customisable, so you can now have birth, baptism, marriage, death and burial edit boxes all available at the same time and they will always be there for you in the future! In fact you can customise this area to include or exclude whichever edit boxes you wish. Great!There are four work areas in the Family tab, each of which may be resized to suit your requirements, allowing wonderful flexibilty.
- The Index pane down the left hand side displays the index of people that may be searched, filtered and sorted in many ways. Hovering the mouse over a person displays the person's brief details allowing easy identification. Also included are Bookmarks (select individuals who are of special interest to you) and History (displays all of the items you have edited or changed). The Index pane may be hidden from view if desired.
- The Pedigree pane upper centre replaces the traditional FTM family card/family view, displaying up to 5 generations in a resizable compact area. Navigation and facilities similar to the 2005 and 2006 pedigree views are retained. The Lower pane may be raised or lowered as desired to reveal more or less of the pedigree pane to suit your preference. Ancestry Hints is a contextual search feature that automatically suggests records pertaining to people in your tree.
- The Lower pane displays the details of the person selected and their spouse, together with the details of their children.
- The Editing pane on the right is where most of the editing takes place. This pane is customisable to display the editing boxes that you choose to display and use. This width of this pane may be adjusted to almost full screen or almost hidden from view.
The second tab in the People area is the Person tab, providing even more editing flexibility. Within this tab there are three options to work with: Facts, Timeline and Relationships. The lower pane is available to record separate Person Notes and Research Notes. The notes area has much more flexibility in style and presentation including bold, italic, underline, bulllets, symbols, colour, spellcheck (nine spellcheck dictionaries to choose from including United Kingdom English and Australian English), and text note size. Also available in the lower pane is an Add Task facility (reminders of things that you need work on). You can schedule tasks to be due on a certain date or leave them open. You can also assign a priority to tasks so you can see what needs to be completed first. There are two types of tasks: general tasks and person tasks; with options to record description, category/location, due date, priority and completion. The timelines highlight personal, family and world events that occurred during your ancestors’ lives. Also provide is a robust tool for sorting and managing your to-do list.Places
Now this is really exciting! Dynamic mapping of the places where your ancestors came from via Microsoft Virtual Earth within Family Tree Maker. The Places area incorporates a place authority of more than 3 million place names worldwide including a large number of UK parishes. Click on a place in the list of places in the left hand pane and see displayed a list of the people in your database that are associated with that place in the right hand pane. At the same time in the centre pane a map of the area is displayed that may easily be zoomed to street, road and building level! Choose between normal mapping, aerial photography (bird's eye view), or a hybrid of the two. Street and road names are displayed. Click the 3D button and 'fly' around the area where your ancestor's lived in 3D colour. It's really neat and very impressive!The place authority is also a great tool to clean up and standardise all of your Family Tree Maker places. Places and Descriptions are now separated which is much more logical and far easier to manage.Media
Family Tree Maker gathers together all of your photographs, images and other media into one place. No more hunting around individual scrapbooks to find where you put that photo. The Media area *links* your media in from the place where it is saved on your hard disk. Multiple links can be created from one photo to numerous people. The result is no more enormous FTM file sizes because the media is not saved within the FTM file. The FTM 2008 backup facility however has the option to automatically backup your media at the same time as backing up your data. Importing family files from previous versions of Family Tree Maker automatically links your scrapbook media into the Media area. Images can be linked to individuals, facts and sources.Sources
It is extremely important to record the sources of all the information that you find during your family history research. The Sources area makes this task really easy. Sources and Citations are now linked, eliminating the need for most copying and pasting. The left hand pane lists your Source Groups that may be sorted and searched by All Source-Citations, Source Titles, Repository or People. The right hand pane has edit boxes for Source Titles, Citation Detail, Citation Text and Reference Notes. The lower pane has a list of people that are linked to each source, Notes, links to media such as census images, photographs, audio and video clips etc. Standardised source rating criteria encourages you to assign a confidence score to each piece of information that you gather.Publish
The Publish area includes the various types of output from Family Tree Maker 2008, including:- Charts (known as trees in previous versions of Family Tree Maker)
- Pedigree Chart, Descendant Chart, Relationship Chart
- added 27nov2007 Hourglass Chart, Vertical Pedigree Chart
- Genealogy Reports
- added 27nov2007 Genealogy Register Report, Ahnentafel Report
- Person Reports
- Individual Report, Custom Report, Research Note Report, LDS Ordinances, Task List
- Relationship Reports
- Family Group Sheet, Kinship Report, Marriage Report, Parentage Report, Outline Descendant Report
- Place Reports
- Media Reports
- Media Items, Photo Album, Media Usage Report
- Source Reports
- Source Usage Report, Source Bibliography, Documented Facts
There are many Share/Export options including a new Send To E-mail facility in formats that include HTML, PDF, CSV, RFT, BMP, EMF, WMF, GIF, JPG, PNG, TIF. Heirloom quality books are created using the new Ancestry Press self-publishing tool. The Publish area has a mini-navigation area at the top making it easy to refocus on another person in your tree.Web Search
Web Searching is tightly integrated with Ancestry.co.uk and is vastly improved. Our own testing confirms that Web Searching for UK people via Family Tree Maker 2008 on Ancestry is very good indeed, assuming that you have suitable basic information to start with. Integration with rootsweb.com, genealogy.com, google.com, yahoo.com and search.live.com is also provided. The powerful Web Clipping facility allows the capture of text from *any* website that you care to visit - all within Family Tree Maker. Merging of information from any of those websites with your own data is optional and is fully under your control. The Browser pane allows you to visit any website. The Web Search area has a mini-navigation area at the top making it easy to refocus on another person in your tree.The Future
Please bear in mind that Family Tree Maker 2008 is a totally new program and is a work in progress. The publishers have announced that some features that are currently missing in 2008 compared with previous versions will be added in the coming months via free download updates.
Service Patch 2
Important. Update 28th November 2007. Service Patch 2 Revision 2 (version 17.0.0.559) has been released incorporating more reports, more charts, performance enhancements and bug fixes. If you are not notified of the availability of SP2 when you start Family Tree Maker 2008, please click the Help menu and Check For Update. If you receive a message that your version is already up to date, click the Help menu again and About Family Tree Maker. Check the version number. If it is not 17.0.0.559 please visit here for full instructions on how to obtain and install SP2.
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