October 15th - Take advantage of the quality control built into Legacy.
Do you take advantage of the quality control built into Legacy? If you click on the Reports tab you can then click on Potential Problems Report. Whether you view the report on your screen or print it out to work with - you have a "fact checker" in Legacy. But as with any good automated fact checker, the user needs to provide the parameters before the fact checker can do its work.
Legacy comes with some defaults built in but the user (that is YOU) can always change things up. You can work your way across the tabs in Potential Problems and choose what fits your situation AND choose the ages or numbers that work with your family. That is what I did (we have more than a few couples that started their families before they were married so that is one item I unchecked; we also have long-lived people so I bumped up the age for death to be a potential problem). Be sure to check out the various items and then run the report.
I always run the report to my screen and then work through it. Today I found that I had (within the past month) entered a birth-date as 1911 instead of 1811 - Legacy caught that. Legacy also caught a few sets of children that needed to be sorted in chronological order. Once you see the "problem" you simply edit either the marriage, the individual, or the children - as appropriate.
Running the Potential Problem Report on a monthly basis and fixing those errors or problems is another way Legacy helps us do a bit of quality control. Today - why not take 15 minutes to run a Potential Problems Report and do a bit of quality control.
I have liked using this feature - I have caught more than one typo in year entries like your example. And once or twice a generational thing where a child was listed as a sibling of the parent. I frequently mouse over the red circled exclamation marks as I'm working in the family view and fix them then and there - dismissing them from the list if the child really was born before the parents' marriage (and I have proof) or marking them for further exploration. I'm working on a case now where new information tells me that the child born 2 years before her parents' marriage was actually the daughter by a first marriage in which the wife died. I needed German records to start piecing this mystery together as the marriages were both in Germany and only the clue Witwer (widower) in the second marriage record opened the window to this. Good reminder for us all.
ReplyDeletegreat Lynn Dosch - I know lots of Legacy users like that red exclamation mark and work right in their program day-to-day. The terrific thing about Legacy is that there are so many different ways to approach a feature - whatever works for you. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteI am in the middle of doing that right now.
ReplyDeleteterrific Melanie Armstrong - until I started doing it once a month, my list was a bit too long. Now it is a manageable 4-6 items.
ReplyDeleteThis confused me! In my Legacy (8) I couldn't find it in Reports. I did eventually find it under the TOOLS menu. However, I just went back and found it also under OTHER REPORTS in the Reports menu. So it is in two places!
ReplyDeleteLots of stuff in a few places (or many ways to get there).
ReplyDelete