Quick Tips and Tricks

Some Quick Tips and Tricks for TMG Users

The hyphen [-] entered first in any text field will exclude that information. It will not appear in any report unless you override it in the Report Options: Miscellaneous Tab. Used as a Surety Value, it indicates wrong information in that source. If you want to enter information that cannot be printed, precede any text in the field by two hyphens [--].
{ }: These curly brackets are called sensitivity brackets. Any text enclosed by sensitivity brackets will not appear in any report unless you override it in the Report Options: Miscellaneous Tab.
The "Zero" Memo: Don't forget about <M0> [M-zero], that wonderful little addition to a witness sentence. Anytime you have several witnesses linked to an event with a memo that will print as an endnote, preface the witness sentence with <M0>. This way, that memo will print only once, as an endnote to the principal's event entry.
Smart Prepositioning: Select "Preposition (blank)" in all your narrative reports and include your preferred preposition in all Tag sentence structures. Your narratives will be more interesting.
Find and Replace: The Master Place list includes the option to find all entries containing a given place and replace them with a different place. This is great, but make sure you count all entries first and use this with care. Don't forget the "Find and Replace" option in your word processor. This is a good way to make your final report consistent even if your TMG data entry wasn't.
The Split Memo: ||. This character is the shift-\ on my keyboard. It can be used in memo fields, place fields, and citation details to separate discrete phrase units. They can then be inserted in various ways in canned texts. This is also another way to keep certain parts of a field from printing.
If information is not printing in a report, check the following:
- Are the correct tags selected in your Report Options?
- Have you excluded sentences or do you use sensitivity brackets often? Look at the Miscellaneous Tab under Report Options and check the boxes to include excluded data and sensitive data.
- Make sure that you have "Include 0 Surety" and "Include Blank Surety" checked on your Report Options: General Tab.
The Filter Variable: [?] entered as the value in a report filter line allows you to reuse the report for different values. TMG will ask for the value each time the report is run.
Right Click: This is new in TMG 5.x. Try the right click on your mouse in any window or field. It will frequently lead you to a shortcut menu and options that aren't readily apparent otherwise. It's the easy way to access all text formatting options.
Sometimes creating a Focus Group in your Project Explorer is faster than creating a report.
Think outside the box. Diana Begeman's treatment of the census as a person allows her to efficiently and creatively examine census evidence. I treat military companies as people. In this way, I can see at a glance all relevant enlistees and the company events that affected them. I'm sure there are other creative ways to use TMG.
Backups: DO THEM OFTEN!

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