Legacy Family Tree 9

Long post, so bottom line: No, I’m not upgrading. I’m not even going to spend the time to find out what new features Legacy is rolling out.

In my efforts to get more organized, I thought I might start from scratch, software-wise — definitely not from scratch entry-wise. Made that mistake a couple of years ago and I still haven’t restored even a fraction of my photos, documents and sources. This is painfully evident from the lack of documentation appearing on the website. But this was necessary since all my “let’s put this over there” silliness finally caught up with me and it really was easier to start over than to try to correct all those paths or find all those files. I retained the names, facts., etc., in the original family file, though. Whew.

Anyway —

I’ve been using Legacy Family Tree pretty much from the beginning. I tried a few other programs, including PAF and others I don’t even remember, but I liked Legacy best and it was more intuitive for me. Since then, I’ve installed all the upgrades, too, but when it came to v.8, I made a huge mistake.

One of the things that sold me on Legacy in the first place was the way the reports looked. I could trick them out the way I wanted — the ones I used the most, anyway, some of them are still ugly — and was pleased with the results. I actually preferred the functionality of GenBox, but the report features were either limited or I couldn’t figure them out — can’t remember which now. So Legacy it was.

With v.8 of Legacy, I don’t recall now which features were added that I use and appreciate, but I know one of the big sellers was the addition of roles for witnesses and the like. I had managed a work-around for this long ago. Having tried that functionality, I’ve returned to my old work around.

However, in adding this feature, the rendering of the events in my go-to research document, the family group sheet, was changed. I can no longer get it to print the way I want, and after several email exchanges with support (and they are awesome, by the way!) it was determined that the changes in the event listings were made to accommodate the new roles feature. Apparently, there aren’t many people complaining about that, because it’s not been changed.

Legacy has announced v.9, and it’s probably going to be available soon because there’s a new book for it. I already know, however, that I won’t be upgrading on this one.

There are always growing pains when new versions are released. But to break something that was already working isn’t acceptable. There is still an option to render events in the family group sheet as a list, but it doesn’t do what it used to do in v.7.

And to allow long-term issues to remain while continuing to release new versions isn’t great, either. The one that comes immediately to mind is the inability to remove these ugly lines from the captions on images that are printed in reports. There is an option to remove the lines, but, obviously, it doesn’t work. There are other check box options in other areas of the program that still don’t work, too. But since I long ago stopped trying to use them, I couldn’t tell you what they are right now.

And just so you know how unreasonable I am, I consider the HTML generated when creating a website from Legacy to be “broken.” It’s about as outdated as I am — and as ugly and bloated — and if you have more than a few hundred people, it’s not like you can just edit each page. When I belonged to the mailing list, this was a frequent complaint from people who were trying to get their trees online. But it’s probably not such an issue anymore, since “everyone” is uploading to Ancestry and such.

When I mentioned the website generation issues to customer service as one of the things not addressed in the then-new v.8, she told me that it worked, so it wasn’t high on the priority list. I would imagine at this point, with so many other online publication tools available, it’s probably not on the list at all. 🙂