Why I'm disappointed with TMG6

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

I've been having a couple of issues with TMG6. As you might remember, I upgraded to TMG in January as I really wanted to start my family history book and needed real footnotes/endnotes (which Legacy 6 doesn't have).

Well after a long import process (there are some bugs with the way TMG imports Legacy files re sources and citations) I finally got my report. I hadn't had much opportunity to use TMG since and finally felt prompted to use it the last couple of days as I had discovered a link to a well documented line of McMurachys. I wanted to merge a McMurachy gedcom with my own file. I came across the following issues/annoyances:

1. The merge function is terrible. By default the automatic merge looks for soundex similarities which causes way to many matches. I changed this to surname exact spelling and first name soundex.
Funnily enough though, even with the default setting, it didn't pick up the most obvious matches (those with the exact same name but with a space Mc Murachy vs. McMurachy, or those names in capitals?).

2. When you check a pair as non-duplicates, the check mark does not show (to confirm you checked it) even though a confirmation message appears. In fact, there is no way to tell that you have even selected the pair as non-duplicated unless you exit the Merge function and run it again. Even then, when you select "don't show non-duplicates" the pair is still included in the count of duplicate pairs.

When I checked with the technical support for TMG I was told that there was nothing wrong with this functionality (it was intentional). Gotta be the most stupid thing I've even seen and I work in the software industry! I'd never let my software developers get away with something so dumb :)

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