How To “AutoOrganize” On Who You Want - Sat, 14 Aug 2010

Yes, as I mentioned two posts ago, I took out AutoOrganize. The only people who it might affect are the ones where AutoOrganize had picked the person that they want, but that person is not the first person in the GEDCOM file, so Behold will no longer pick them.

If that is your case, here is what you can do to get Behold to change who it picks.

1. Open your GEDCOM with the new version of Behold. It will now Organize around the first person in the file and if they have one, their spouse.

2. From the menu, select Organize->Families. You will see the people Behold selected.

3. Click on the “Add…” button on the right of the window, which brings up an info box telling you how to add people. But that’s just info. Do what it says and go to the Everything report, find the person or people you want as the primary people, and right-click on them and select “Add Family Of” to add them to the family list.

4. Once those people are added, go the Organize->Families page, select a family you don’t want, and click the “Remove” button. Do this for each family you don’t want, leaving the ones you want.

5. Click the “OK” button at the bottom and voila, Behold has been organized around the people you want.

Now, the thing you’ll want to do is save that information so you don’t have to do this everytime you start Behold. From the menu, select File->Save As and enter the name of the file you want to save this as. If this is the main way you want to look at your GEDCOM file, then give it the same name as your GEDCOM file leaving off the “.ged”. Notice at the top of the Behold window, it will now have that name with the “.bho” suffix on it. You have now saved this information into a Behold file.

Exit Behold and start it up again. Go to the menu and select File->Recent Files and select the .bho file you just created. This will read the Organize information that was saved in the .bho file, and it will then load your GEDCOM file and apply that Organize information, and the file will display the way you want.

The beauty of this is that for one GEDCOM file, you can have many Behold files. You can view your data in different ways from different perspectives, save that view in a Behold file, and load it instantly by opening the appropriate Behold file.

There are other tabs on the Organize pages as well. On the Report page, you can change the text of various items in the Everything Report. To save that information so you don’t have to reenter it every time, you save it in a Behold file. Some people have been translating those items to a different language and then save it into a Behold file. So you might end up with a bunch of Behold files, e.g. MyFileForMe.bho, MyFileForUncleJoe.bho, German.bho, French.bho - all of which will load the MyFile.ged file, but with different Organize settings.

I think its a rather innovative approach. There’s a lot it can do. If you load the MyFileForUncleJoe.bho file, and you find out he want it in French, then go to the Organize->Report, and click the “Merge from” button and select the French.bho file and it will merge the French words into the file.

I hope to get users to do the translation (since I only know computer languages) and I’ll maintain a collection of language files that all Behold users will be able to download for free.