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make family tree in Visio - manually or automated via db?

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Nod5:
I have mapped some of my family's history. So far I have it all in a plain textfile, well ordered for a human reader (I use FM FMF FMFF and so on, and some common abbreviations). But there are some irregularities and the data is not yet in a "machine readable" database format.

I want to go from there to a nice family tree image in Microsoft Visio.

Each person should have his/her own box with some recurring details (name, year born/deceased, age, a miniphoto if available, and some other details). The boxes should be linked by lines that mark parent/child relations. The most recent generation should be at the bottom and each preceding generation should be "stacked" on top so to say. In general, I want the standard family tree looks and contents.

I have two alternative ways to reach that goal:

1. Make the tree manually in Visio: make some basic, standard shapes for the boxes, copy a lot of them onto the drawing board and then copy and paste in data from my notes to each shape and draw relation lines.

2. Convert the data into some database (simple like an excel or calc sheet or perhaps some complex application). And then, somehow, autogenerate the visio family tree from it. The manual work in Visio would only/mostly consist in polishing the looks (more around boxes to make the tree fit better and look better, add some special, one of a kind relations, add colors, and so on)

The tree will all in all include 50-100 individuals. Maybe less if needed to make it more manageable and printable.

My question: does anyone think I should go for alternative 2? If so, do you already have positive experience from working through that automation process (for a family tree or something sufficiently similar) with Visio? Or do you have advice on how to go about doing it? What database format is best to use? I would prefer to just use an excel/calc sheet as database, if that is possible in this case. But is it?

Ok, lot's of sub-questions. But feel to also just let me know your hunch on the main question (do 1 or 2?) without going into details. Any feedback is appreciated  :Thmbsup:

My hunch at the moment is that 1 would take less objective time. But I resent doing this type of thing manually if I have a feeling that it could've been automated so I'm still undecided which is the best alternative all things considered. I have not yet done much searching on Visio guides but will do so later on. But there are so many choices, and possible complications, whenever it comes to databases so I'm thinking that it might be a good thing to throw out some questions early on.

sword:
How to do your option two:
http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/flow_chart_software_software/

www.boxesandarrows.com/view/automating_diagrams_with_visio

...process that relies on text files exported from Excel and uses Visio to transform
those text files into diagrams...Visio 2002 has native Excel support...Better yet: use
the built-in outlining features of word...can insert an Excel spreadsheet into a Visio doc
as a table, and link it...LazySitemapGenerator uses both Excel formulas and a single
macro to produce a worksheet than can exported from Excel and imported into Visio...

http://forum.us.mindjet.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=16

http://flow-chart-software.suggestsoft.com/ ( ...export to Visio...)

http://flow-chart-software.mesothelioma.suggestsoft.com/

My preferences: genealogy applications; organization charts; outlines; tables; Visio

Deozaan:
This isn't Visio, but I use http://www.geni.com/



Sorry the screen shot is so small and blurry... It contains personal info. :)

It has more than what the screenshot shows. It allows you to enter all sorts of information about your family tree, and if you enter in the e-mail address of your family members, they can sign up and add what they know. My family tree at Geni has 134 blood relatives in it and I'm connected to 392 people total due to other relations. Of all those people, I only added 39 myself.

Nod5:
I was very late with my reply to the above... And to make things worse, I posted it in the wrong thread! https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=14100.0 And to make things worst, I didn't notice the mistake until just now. :D Here it is, in the right place, at last:

Thanks for the replies. Though I already picked the manual path (   ) and completed a tree the day before christmas. It took a fair amount of time to say the least so I'm still very interested in more programmatic ways to do this in the future.

@Deozaan: I've testdriven Geni and it seems excellent for collaborative work. But last time I looked at it I couldn't find any easy way to print the tree in a compact way (i.e. cram as much of the information as possible into one or a few sheets of paper). Has there been improvements in that regard? Or are there any third party apps to export to and then print from? I'm asking since my older relatives will want to see my tree and they are not keen on (to say the least) to access it through a computer.

@sword: thanks! Lots of things for me to look into in those links. The second one seems dated though (some of the comments on that page claim that the advice does not work in Visio 2003 so I suspect it will not work in Visio 2007 either).

4wd:
You could try the free Personal Ancestral File - reports are able to be customised to a degree, you can add media, and all the standard family tree stuff, (it's what my wife uses).

And once the data is in there you always have the option to export as a GEDCOMw file to another database, online site, (eg. Genes Reunited) or create your own website using a free GEDCOM to HTML converter, (eg. PAF above, check here or use the excellent phpGedView if you have access to a decent server).

If you like you can use phpGedView as your family tree program, you can run it stand-alone on your PC and enter all your data in.  It uses MySQL database, (or variants), so should be able to be read by anything else that can read MySQL, (don't quote me on this, I'm not database literate :) ).

If you want a simple program that allows entering/displaying of basic family tree data and notes, then it doesn't get much simpler than Simple Family Tree - good if you just want to put the executable and the database on an autorun CD and then send to relatives.

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