Gramps 3.3 Wiki Manual - Navigation
As long as any database is open, GRAMPS is focused on a single person usually referred to as an Active Person. This allows you to view or modify the data concerning this person, his or her immediate family, etc. Navigating in the database (i.e. moving from person to person) is in fact nothing else but changing the Active Person. This section describes many alternative ways to navigate through the database using both the complex and the convenient interfaces GRAMPS provides. All these ways eventually accomplish the same thing, but some are more convenient than others, depending what you are doing in GRAMPS at the moment.
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Contents
Using the People View
The most intuitive way to select an Active Person is to use the People Category. When in the People View, just select the name of the desired person from the list by clicking that list entry. The person you have selected becomes active. The statusbar updates to reflect the change of the active person.
Using the Family View
When in the Relationships, you can easily navigate between the members of the displayed family as follows:
To make the currently selected spouse the Active Person, click the double-arrow button to the right of the Active Person box. Alternatively, right-click into the spouse box and select Make the selected spouse an Active Person item from the context menu.
To make the currently selected parents the active family (thereby making father the Active Person and mother the selected spouse), click the right-arrow button to the right of the active person's parents box. Alternatively, right-click into the active person's parents box and select Make the selected parents the active family item from the context menu.
To make the currently selected spouse's parents the active family (thereby making father the Active Person and mother the selected spouse), click the right-arrow button to the right of the spouse's parents box. Alternatively, right-click into the spouse's parents box and select Make the selected parents the active family item from the context menu.
To make the currently selected child the Active Person, click the left-arrow button to the right of the children box. Alternatively, right-click into the children box and select Make the selected child an Active Person item from the context menu.
In addition to this, GRAMPS provides an extensive set of keyboard navigation options. The detailed reference to the key bindings is found in the append-keybind.
Using the Ancestry Views
The Ancestry Category also allow you to move along the family tree. The benefit of this method is that you can see more than one generation of the family tree. Also, you can jump directly from a great-grandson to a great-grandfather without going through the intermediate generations.
Note that after changing the Active Person in the Ancestry Views, the display is re-adjusted to show up to five generations, starting from the newly selected Active Person. When in the Ancestry Views, you can easily navigate between the members of the displayed family tree as follows:
To make any displayed person the Active Person, right-click the corresponding box and choose the first entry in the context menu.
To make a child of the currently Active Person (if any) the Active Person, click the left arrow button to the left of the corresponding box. If there is more than one child, the button expands to the menu listing the children to choose from.
To move the whole family tree one generation back, click on the corresponding right arrow button on the right-hand side of the display area. Clicking the upper button will move the tree along the paternal line. Clicking the lower button will move the tree along the maternal line.
Clicking either of these buttons is completely equivalent to double-clicking the lines connecting to the left of the corresponding boxes for father and mother.
You can also quickly access any of the spouses, siblings, children, or parents of any displayed person. To do this, move the mouse over the desired person's box and right-click to invoke a context menu. The appropriate menu items will contain submenus listing all spouses, siblings, children, and parents of the corresponding person.
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Advantages of using right-click menus Direct access to spouse and siblings. Complete lists of all member of all categories, not only the preferred members. |
Setting the Home Person
One and only one person in the database can be selected as the Home person. Once the Home person is selected, moving to that person becomes a matter of a single click, regardless of which view you are using at the moment.
To set the Home person, first navigate to that person using any method you like. Then choose Edit ->Set Home person . Once this is done, you can move to the Home person from anywhere in the database by simply clicking the Home icon on the toolbar. You can also choose Go ->Home from the menu or select Home item from any context menu available on the right click.
Using history-based tools
GRAMPS also features a powerful set of history-based navigation tools. These tools are similar to those commonly used in web browsers. They include Back and Forward items available from the Go menu, context menus (available in People, Family, and Pedigree views), and the toolbar buttons. They also include the list of the recent selections available under the Go menu that allows you to jump directly to any of the recent selections. Finally, right-clicking on the Back and Forward toolbar buttons invokes the popup menu with corresponding portion of the history. Select any item from the menu to jump directly to it.
Bookmarks
Similar to setting the Home person, you can bookmark other people from the database to simplify further navigation. To bookmark a person, first navigate to that person, then choose Bookmarks ->Add bookmark . To move to that person from anywhere in the database, choose Bookmarks ->Go to bookmark ->Person's name .
You can manage your bookmarks by choosing Bookmarks ->Organize bookmarks... . This opens the following Organize Bookmarks dialog with the list of bookmarks and the controls to modify this list.
Use the Up en Down button to change the list sequence. Use the Remove button to remove a Bookmark. The Help will bring you to this page, and you close the Organize Bookmarks window with the Close button.
The Bookmarked People can be selected through the People View, as explained above, but also through the Relationships View, Families View, and the Pedigree View.
On a similar basis you can also Bookmark: Events, Sources, Places, Media, Repositories , and Notes
Finding records
To find a record in a database, first switch to the appropriate View that provides the list of the desired records: People, Sources, Places, or Media. Then start typing the name of a person or the title of a Source, Place, or Media object that you are looking for, respectively. You may also press <Ctrl> + F to turn on the search mode, but simply starting to type is also enough.
As you type, the first record in the list that is compatible with your input will be selected.
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Finding People For more complex people searches you may want to use filters. Enable filter controls by choosing View ->Filter , select the desired filter, and click Apply . For details, see Filters. |
Using the Clipboard
This tool provides a temporary note pad to store database records for easy reuse. In short, this is a sort of the copy-and-paste functionality extended from textual objects to other types of records used in GRAMPS.
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Clipboard makes extensive use of drag and drop technique To invoke Clipboard, either choose Edit->Clipboard or click the Clipboard button on the toolbar. |
Clipboard supports addresses, attributes (both personal and family), events (both personal and family), names, media objects references, source references, URLs, and of course textual information of notes and comments. To store any type of these records, simply drag the existing record on to the Clipboard Pad from the corresponding
editor dialog. To reuse the record, drag it from the Clipboard on to the corresponding place in the editor, e.g. Address tab, Attribute tab, etc.
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Tip Clipboard storage is persistent within a single GRAMPS session. Closing the window will not lose the stored records. However, exiting GRAMPS will. |
The accelerator key is now <CTRL+B>. For an application like GRAMPS the Clipboard is very important. Just one example: You find a birth certificate of a person. In this certificate also the witnesses are mentioned. And the birth certificate also determines a source where the information was stored. The best way is to open the clipboard and drag the source you want to work with there. Then use drag and drop to use it in new items you use. Now you can finalize the information on the person editor screen. Drag that info also to the Clipboard. Now you add two new persons for the witnesses (assuming you do not have them already in your database). Simply drag and drop the birth info to the witness event screen. You are then presented with the screen where you can change the role of the witness to witness for this birth event. You do the same with the other witness.
This saves you a lot of typing and possible errors.
Windows Manager
Windows -> Menu provides a quick access to opened windows.
Tagging
Go to Menu -> Edit -> Tag.
Or clic Tag button on the toolbar.
Concept
- For people using gmail or thunderbird, tags will not be something new. Instead of
classifying mails into folders like in Outlook (Windows) or Evolution (Linux), mails are classified by assigning tags to them. So instead of having a disjoint N:1 classification (a mail can be in one and only one folder, and a folder can contain many emails), in gmail or thunderbird there is a N:M classification (a mail can have several tags, and a tag can be applied to several mails)
Likewise, when you have a big tree, you might want to make subsets of the tree, and these subsets might be overlapping. For example, the subsets of your father's family and your mother's family, some subset of your family that emigrated to the USA, or the famous people in the tree.
The idea is to assign a different tag to each subset: FATHER, MOTHER, USA and FAMOUS for example.
Differences with markers
- Markers are like the folders for mails. A person can be given at most one
marker. Tags are thus like multiple-valued markers.
Tags and Filters
- Tags and filters both create subsets of the tree. However they have practical differences.
Specifying your father's family using filters is an easy thing; there are already filters based on some logics that do it. On the other hand, specifying the people that emigrated to the USA is harder, while for the famous people in your family it is simply impossible as there is no logical rule. Tags are much more practical here.
However filters have the advantage of being dynamical. If you add an ancestor of your father in the database, it will be automatically added to the filter.
On the other hand, tags are statical. When adding a famous person in the tree, you have to explicitely tag it as FAMOUS.
- The most immediate object that comes to mind are the individuals, and that is also the most useful. However, other objects could be tagged:
Places: For example "places to visit", Source: For example "sources in german", Notes: For example "notes in progess", or "notes in german", Media: For example "Picture belonging to Uncle Alfred".
Tags have been added to People, Families, Notes and Media.
Operations with tags
Here are a few ideas of operations that can be done with tags
Filtering
The most obvious use is that of filtering.
Tagging a selection of objects
Due to the static nature of tags, it might be useful to add a tag to a selection of objects. For example one should be able to select a number of person in the Person View, and add them a new tag or an existing one.
Tags Column
It's convenient to have a Tags column in the views of objects that can be tagged. The content is a comma-separated list of the tags of the objects.
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