Family Tree Maker 2011 Platinum (PC)

The two previous upgrades have been little more than bugfixes and a couple of minor new features, which have been greeted by scorn in many reviews on Amazon. This upgrade is rather different, offering various significant improvements.

The addition of automatic person and relationship numbering is long overdue, but goes some way to solving the problem of getting the right "Joe Bloggs" in a Bloggs family full of Joes.

The extension of "fastfields" to description fields is very welcome. No more typing in "agricultural labourer" or "domestic servant" umpteen times! FTM now guesses what you are typing. This also removes many typographical errors.

The Timeline view benefits from being customizable. This is very useful, because users in the UK can now modify "The Boer Wars" so they appear in British or World historical events instead of just African. You can now add other historical events that are important to your family, or remove those that are not. This is American software, so it lists various events that mean nothing much outside America. It lists "Ford Model T Manufactured in Detroit" under "World History" but doesn't mention "The Blitz" or "VE Day" or "British National Health Service launched" at all, all of which are important historical events in Britan. Well now you can put all that right.

Having said this, the improvement has robbed us of the amusement to be had from seeing things like "Battle Of Little Big Horn" listed among the historical events that might be relevant to one's "agricultural labourer" ancestors living in Norfolk!

Places now actually understands that you are in the UK and not America. When you in the UK search for "Oxford" it no longer assumes you mean "Oxford Alabama". This makes it almost unnecessary to resort to Googling Bing Maps all the time (the irony being that FTM uses Bing Maps).

Media management is a little better. The reports are significantly better, but they still do not include a datestamp (so you know when a particular report was created). Web Search is now tied-in more closely with FTM, and seems to run more smoothly too.

The user interface has had a minor polish. It is now green (was blue) and has some new toolbar icons. The People view (the one with the family tree) is easier to navigate, though it doesn't come close to the fluidity and ease of the Ancestry app that they offer (for free) on iPhone (which looks fantastic on iPad).

Sources can still get in a bit of a knot though, especially where copies of sources occur. I found that compacting the database and then restarting FTM sorts that out.

The user guide is now in a printed book. That's handy but I prefer to use the PDF copy that comes on the CD. Their technical author does a pretty good job, but she would do well to concentrate on documenting the step-by-step procedures more consistently. For a technical author, her grammar is a bit slack, too.

One last thing - FTM comes in a much smaller box than before. About time too. The huge empty box it used to come in was a bit silly.

Overall, it's a worthy update. It's not spectacular, but for once is genuinely worth the money. As for the future, I am not convinced that Ancestry will continue with desktop software of this kind for many more years. The huge improvements being made in Ancestry's web-based FTM software shows where they are spending their software development budget. I predict that, in 2-3 years, we'll not be installing FTM on our computers at all, but will be doing the whole thing via a web-based applicaton (in other words, doing it the Cloud Computing way). That bodes well for instant software updates, and far better integration between their web-search tools and the users' FTM databases.

I have be using FTM software for many a year and have always bought the latest version. The problem with this 2011 version is it will not import a reasonable sized previous version Family Tree File. The support is pathetic and extremely confusing even for a computer literate person. You are in a great deal of danger of losing your data if you do not take full back-ups of your existing FTM file (in my case FTM2010). The conversion of your file will take a long time almost 24 hours in my case, I have about 4000 names in my tree and when it is finished or half finished in my case, it had corrupted the file, is incomplete and does not work. I have tried all the fixes on their website and nothing works so have come to the conclusion this is the most appalling upgrade of software I have ever encounted, don't use it unless you are a new user and are starting from scratch - otherwise you will be sorry.
I've had to revert back to using the 2010 version after almost 4 months of trying to get 2011 version to work.

Come on FTM sort this problem out fix your software and stop ignoring the problem - post some understandable advice on your website or put some clear warnings on the box.

Purchased in October as soon as it was released and I have used it nearly every day since. The free 6 months prescription to Ancestry.com makes the purchase a great buy. There some gliches with the latest version of FTM however these appear to have been corrected in an update released 10 November. I had been using FTM 2006 for three years which is an excellent programme but I was forced to change when I upgraded my computer to Windows 7. The FTM 2011 screen layout is very busy and not as user friendly as my 2006 version however I had no choice but to change. 2011 has many new features and greater flexibility, it is well worth the purchase.