GenealogyClassBlog

Two Saturdays ago I presented a program on Genealogy Software for the Tulsa City-County Library. To those who attended, I handed out a checklist that I’d created to use while comparing various genealogy software solutions. There are many factors that need our attention when we try to choose a program or other solution for organizing our genealogical data or in networking with others. As I had prepared what I was going to say about features to compare from one solution to another I realized that my students would need a place to make their notes about what they’d found. I suggested that they watch for whether the web site of the product was helpful and attractive, whether a demo version was available, whether there was a users forum or access to technical support. Not only is price important, but so is platform, version, and format. I also suggested that each person might be able to define some capabilities that would be deal-breakers for them, such as whether the solution could output onto large charts, whether it could handle multimedia, and whether their genealogy data could be transferred with little or no hiccups from their cousin’s computer to theirs. I hope that this checklist will be a useful tool for making those comparisons.

I am making the Genealogy Software Comparison Checklist available in .PDF format, and I am also removing the file I had previously uploaded, which was created in Microsoft Office 2003 (for Windows). Feel free to download this for personal use. You may need Adobe Reader to open the file (unless you have a Mac, and then Preview will do it for you). You can download Adobe Reader at http://get.adobe.com/reader/. I hope there are no compatibility issues with this one, so I’d like to hear about any problems that I might be able to correct, or any suggestions as to how the content could be improved.

And for those who attended the program, thanks for coming! Any success with finding a genealogy software solution?