Monday, April 20, 2009

GEDxlate Makes List Management Easy

I'll admit that I get excited about new computer programs in general and especially about those which are helpful to me in unexpected ways. GEDxlate is one of those.

GEDxlate is a FREE Windows program that quickly and easily translates genealogy data from standard GEDCOM format into MS Access dB (*.mdb), MS Excel Worksheet (*.xls), comma delimited (*.csv), or text file (*.txt) formats. I tend to focus on Excel Worksheets for a lot of my list keeping (and we even offer a class on the genealogy applications of Excel), so this program got my interest in a hurry.

It will take a GEDCOM of your database that you create and then put the data into an Excel format so you can look at it all at once and sort it in any order you wish. Here is how I immediately used this capability. I asked for all of the people in my database to be listed with their names, and birth and death dates (the specific data you want displayed is easily specified with a mouse click or two). It was then easy for me to see which people in my list were missing those pieces of information and where I needed to spend some research time. And I could also easily print out those with missing data to make a rough to-do list.

This was much easier than creating a custom report from my genealogy program to get that information, and is certainly was easier than looking at each person in my database individually.

You can read about the program and download it at http://www.gedmagic.com/GEDxlate.htm

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