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Three days only - Family Tree Maker upgrade sale - date 8 Nov 2020

  • Thread starter Thread starter At home in NZ
  • Start date Start date
A

At home in NZ

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That is the subject line of the latest email from Mackiev. Offering an upgrade to 2019 for AUD59.95.

Looking at the 'blurb' the program now seems rather complex and I am wondering how many people actually think they need all the bells and whistles being offered.

I am quite happy with my FTM2017, what do members of the forum who use FTM think?
 
My favourite part of either is the smart colour coding, which is available in both.

Other than that, I have definitely made use of the TreeVault service, and I did have to use the rollback feature (i.e. rolling back changes in the FTM tree) when I accidentally deleted/duplicated over 100 persons in the tree, and that was easier than finding them all the manually deleting/merging them all.
 
One feature I like is the smart filters, whereby if you add new people to your tree who meet the criteria (or add information to existing people so they meet the criteria), they automatically get added to that filter's list, so you don't have to keep updating filters manually. I like having filtered lists for looking at particular branches, but I used to find they quickly got out of date, so this has been quite a timesaver for me.

I also agree with jorghes that the 'rollback' feature is useful for correcting mistakes involving multiple people.
 
Apart from new features it does make a lot of sense to keep up to date with new releases. If you start to get too far behind and your version becomes non supported and something happens or you need to update to the latest, then it could take a lot of time, effort and money to get you from where you were to the current software. Small manageable steps when everything is working is much safer than all the stress involved when something stops working.
Presumably this is your main Family History Software? And use it many times a week?
Other pieces of software that you use are all moving on, Win 10 (or Mac), Ancestry, FMP, all the internet explorers etc.
From a software perspective, keeping what you use frequently up to date makes more sense than not.
Take advantage of the reduced price and the new features and treat yourself to the latest software and peace of mind.
 
Tim said:
Presumably this is your main Family History Software? And use it many times a week?
Click to expand...
I use Ancestry for building my tree and researching, I sync with FTM2017.
I don't use colours in FTM, I probably wouldn't use the newer features as I never felt the need for the existing ones in FTM2019.
I have charting companion plugged into my FTM and use that for coloured charts. I use the FTM descendancy and other reports
Maybe I am doing things differently from the others because I do not have an all encompassing tree. I have several trees. For example one for my paternal ancestry, one for my maternal grandmother's ancestry and so on.
I like simple, stupid. :D

Why fix something if it ain't broke?
 
I don't use FTM, but when I saw this offer my instinctive reaction was that there is probably a new version in the works: 2017. 2019, 2021???
 
Tim said:
Maybe all the more reason to update now?
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Maybe, and maybe not - it depends on their pricing model. If the next version of FTM is similarly-priced to the current version they'll be constrained on how much they can charge for upgrades, whilst if it is more expensive it'll be difficult for them to pick up new users (given that Family Historian is less than half the price of the current version).
 
Tim said:
As long as you're aware that Ancestry gedcoms are the worst and they don't contain any media.
Click to expand...
Not sure about 'worst' but am aware of no media.
Nothing is going to make me spend money I do not want to spend!

peter said:
(given that Family Historian is less than half the price of the current version).
Click to expand...
But, does it sync with Ancestry? The 'syncability' is what is attractive for me.

This discussion was supposed to be about what members thought about the upgrade on offer. We seem to have digressed a tad.
 
Initial sales, at least with the last couple of releases (2017 and 2019) have had large discounts applied, particularly to people who already own an earlier copy to get them to upgrade.

Plus FTM is one of the only programs to work on a Mac, the other option is MacFamilyTree, which while brightly coloured, does not have the sync aspect.
 
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