nFS sources

Some source data is provided in the following place:

individual detail
summary
individual sources (at the bottom of summary)

In the screen that pops up, the data is just useless. I picked a random Colonial American ancestor to see what her sourcess are. First, the screen was blank for quite awhile. When data appeared, there was no way to search it. I copied and tried to paste to Word, but it froze. Multiple attempts did not work. However, pasting to Excel yielded in excess of 2,000 lines of data, each source being one line.

Aside from the popping up window after window (really irritating!!!), this isn't searchable without exporting the data. Why? What is the point in setting it up like this?

Also, nFS seems to vacilate between the term "contributor" and the term "source". To genealogists, these are two separate things. A contributor would be someone posting to AF or submitting to the temple/IGI. A source would be a specific civil, religious record, or other record, such as a christening or ship's manifest that specifically identifies a person at a particular time and place. This is another issue of misunderstanding the end user.

If you have IE7 you can search using Google on the current page, have you tried that option for searching.

I would like to see a link to the sources next to each event rather than in a big list. I would also like to have the ability to rank sources so we can have the real sources listed first.

No, this screen opens in a separate window that lacks all of the normal options at the top of the screen.

If you go into Tools and select Internet Options (under Tabs on the General page click settings) you can force popups to open in a new tab, then you have those search options available. I like the way nFS operates in IE7 using this option, it causes each pop up to be displayed in full screen tabs so you don't have to do so much scrolling as well.

Thanks for the additional workaround. We shouldn't have to create workarounds to use the software, though.

I despise tabs for the same reason that I dislike the constant new windows popping up. Comparing data for differing people by having a bunch of different screens open is ineffective. Moving back and forth in nFS and trying to figure out which new window goes with which person is absurd.

One would hope that these things would have been worked out in the beta tests, but sometimes the best feedback comes after it is released to the public. When nFS finally reaches version 1.0 (technically that means we are still using a beta product) I trust that many of these glitches and awkward designs (that must have seemed like a good idea or necessary at the time) will have been fixed and improved. Obviously some of these fixes and improvements may have to be pushed back to nFS version 2.0

Some of the notes in the system already as placed there by the data administrators has proven very useful.

I'm working through an issue for another consultant who I had in as his helper last night, the name is not combined with any other record nor are there duplicates, but we found temple work partially done on the name via an extraction record. We even found the batch number in the notes so we knew it was extracted. We're trying to find out when the temple work was all finished, or if some is in reality still pending, so his records will be complete about the individual.

However the problem is everyone thinks it was a member (patron) submitted name, the C- in the batch number says otherwise, it was extracted from microfilm. I'm running the entire issue up another flagpole or two, so beyond how it relates to the discussion of notes and sources that's as far as the problem discussion goes here in this thread.

Agreed that a line or two of source info may be useable. It is folks with thousands of lines of sources where the format is an issue.

You're probably right on the formatting.

Looks like they are using a format that makes everything look like it is one sentence, rather than using delimiters to put each part of the source on a single line, that would actually make the data in the sources easier to read and find particular things in there.

Most discussions on PAF sources for example often show an identified best practice where you do exactly that, place each element of the source citation on one line, or if part of the source citation is a couple lines long, start a new line for the next element, and so forth. It's just common sense.

Maybe we need another designation for a source image when we are allowed to link to them in the folders. These old source citations carried over from AF PRF IGI Extraction were good for their day, but when we start adding linked source images I hope they are not combined in with all these old source citations. In the Life Browser it called them evidences rather than sources.

GarysTurn wrote:If you go into Tools and select Internet Options (under Tabs on the General page click settings) you can force popups to open in a new tab, then you have those search options available. I like the way nFS operates in IE7 using this option, it causes each pop up to be displayed in full screen tabs so you don't have to do so much scrolling as well.

I found tabs and turned that on to give this a whirl. All of the windows that opened in small windows with no toolbar at the top continue to do so. Resizing makes the font larger, rather than adjusting the viewing space. Still no method of searching when there are hundreds or thousands of lines of data.

scion wrote:I found tabs and turned that on to give this a whirl. All of the windows that opened in small windows with no toolbar at the top continue to do so. Resizing makes the font larger, rather than adjusting the viewing space. Still no method of searching when there are hundreds or thousands of lines of data.

No method of searching? If you're using Firefox, Control-F should bring up a "Find" bar at the bottom of the window. If you're using a different browser, might it have a similar feature?

(Or, being as I'm jumping into the middle of the thread, did I completely misunderstand?)

scion wrote:I found tabs and turned that on to give this a whirl. All of the windows that opened in small windows with no toolbar at the top continue to do so. Resizing makes the font larger, rather than adjusting the viewing space. Still no method of searching when there are hundreds or thousands of lines of data.

I use tab browsing and get the search option. I use it all the time. This is how I have my IE7 settings set up.

Go to Internet Options in the TOOLS Menu

On the GENERAL tab find "Tabs" and select the SETTINGS option

In the Tabbed Browsing Settings menu select (put check mark) ENABLE TABBED BROWSING
Under the sub options, select all options (put check next to all sub options)

Under "When a Pop-up is encountered:" select ALWAYS OPEN POP-UPS IN A NEW TAB (put a check mark) This is the option you might not have selected.

Under "Open Links From Other Programs In:" select A NEW TAB IN THE CURRENT WINDOW (put a check mark) This also needs to be selected

With the above options selected in nFS I get all my pop ups in new tabs and have full search capabilities within each tab. The tabs open one at a time from left to right and you are always moved to the next tab. You must close the most recent tab to get full function in the previous tab, because nFS thinks they are popups. You can go back to previous tabs and look at the info there, which you can't do very well with popups on top of previous pages, but if you try selecting something in a previous tab, without closing the most recently opened tab, you get strange results because nFS is expecting input from the last popup. I have also found that if I want to look at other web sites it is best to open a new occurance of IE to do that in and keep all of nFS together.

Here is an example of how this works in Netscape (even with tabs selected):
Search for Obadiah Holmes KNWX-MVV
select summary
scroll to the bottom of the screen to select individual sources
wait and wait
a popup comes up
wait and wait and wait
a lot of data populates the screen
As stated previously, 1) this screen is not searchable, and 2) as long as this one is open, another Obadiah Holmes cannot be compared. The only way I can find to compare the source data is to copy and paste to Excel (Word freezes at the thought). It is 3271 lines long, most of which, but not all, is one source per line. Excel needs to be cleaned up just to compare.

Meanwhile, changing screens is really slow. Several options that I clicked on took 3-5 minutes to appear.

I'm not interested in combining these folks because there are sooooo many other living people working on this line. However, this is just not functional.