Field size : Limits and capabilities

[BrianHTabor]

Notes pop up.pngThis pop up occurred when I was happily typing away in the notes field of a prolific relative. I did not realize that there are limits to the various fields until I visited the Field Size list in the manual. Would LeisterPro consider expanding this area? I have a great deal more to add for this person. There was an additional pop up leading me to a page to add another person - but I want to keep all of the information with this person. How are users handling this limitation issue?

[Bob White]

Simple solution! You can have multiple Notes fields within Notes. Just start a second field and you can be happily typing until that one reaches its 64K characters. And then.....

Also, I am of the opinion that Leister should consider a bigger limit. Unknown to me if this 64K limit is based on technical reasons or is just a carryover from the days of expensive memory and 32K apps.

[Amy]

Won't it let you add another note for the person, where you can continue the story? For example, if you use the notes field for a biography of the person, you could create more note fields called something like Bio Part 2, Bio Part 3, etc.

That seems like it would be an easy workaround, unless this limit is a total of 64K for all the the notes added up.

[Amy]

Congratulations for having enough info about an ancestor to run up to the 64K limit! My worst problem is the 255 character limit for each field in a source, which I run up against often, as I follow the Evidence Explained source style.

[BrianHTabor]

Thanks everyone for your response, much appreciated. I now see how to add an additional note, but one of you alluded to changing it's name. How exactly do you do that? I have tried highlighting the newest 'Misc. notes' file as well as right-clicking but it does not allow me to edit and/or change it's name. I want to be able to distinguish it from the older one by the same name by adding some dates.

[jmo]

Because of the flexibility in Reunion, there are multiple ways to accomplish this. First, I create different Note Types. In addition to the Miscellaneous Note and Research Note Types, I have Biography, Obituary, Newspaper Item, Census Note, Residence, Correspondence, Reference and more. In your example of putting tens of thousands of words into a single Note, I would break up your story into Chapters. Let’s say you created a new Note Type of MyStory Note. I would create a blank MyStory Note and start telling the story. When I get to a chapter break, I would create a new MyStory Note, add the chapter name on the first line and bold or italicize it, then start the text. I would continue doing this until the story was told. In my own use, I created multiple Miscellaneous Notes. On one I had a header line of BIRTH, then a discussion on proof of birth place and date and whether there were conflicting dates and places. I did the same for Death and Land Purchases etc. Breaking the story into smaller chunks it is easier to assign and manage Source Citations, too.

Hope that helps.

[jmo]

I should add that you can use different Note Types to tell the story. For instance, your first Note could be a Biography Note and you could write a few paragraphs of a high level biographical summary. The next note could be a Miscellaneous Note with the first line title of BIRTH where you go into details on birth. Then another note contains Career info. Reunion compiles all these together into one flowing story in a Register or Book. And if you decide the Career info should appear before the Birth discussion, just drag the Notes into the sequence you want them to appear.

I wish that when Reunion created an RTF report it would use the Note Type name as the names for the generated paragraphs, so one could apply different styles to different parts of the story using Word.

[Paul Reitz]

Joe, thanks for explaining how this can be done, and hope you can educate me a little more.

Maybe because I use 13 types of notes I've not needed to duplicate fields to avoid hitting a limit. Even so, when info greatly accumulates, it gets aggregated into one or more files and added as multimedia.

I haven't attempted creating books, etc. so is there something your method accomplishes, or permits, that multimedia attachments would not?