Comments on: Family Tree Maker 2008 Program Updates (SP3) are Now Available

By: Michelle Pfister

Michelle Pfister — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 00:44:12 +0000

#219 Wanda

Thanks for your comments. I think you were given incorrect information regarding living persons. I’m taking steps to correct the mis-information. Protecting the information of living persons is an important thing, and I understand why you would want to do it.

We’re working on making the RTF export better.

As with many of the bug reports here, I’ve forwarded your concern to our best FTM technician. Best to you.

By: Wanda Reed

Wanda Reed — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:54:20 +0000

I have desperately been trying to output an Outline Descendant Report that I could edit.

The thing is this: I don’t want to hand a report to somebody I just met that contains vital information on living persons. That’s not a good thing to do. Oh yes, and I’d like to leave those people in the chart to show they are there, just shown as living persons. When FTM 2008 privatizes a file, it leaves complete names, notes, and in some cases dates and places in all reports. That is bad. I’ve talked to the Technical Support people and they told me that “trying to hide information about living persons is contrary to the goal of FTM”!

I tried dumping the descendants into a seperate file, privatizing as it did so, then changing living person’s names to living person LASTNAME and deleting any residual data. After about 40 people, the program crashes. Apparently FTM does not like to have too many people with the same name.

I tried exporting the report to RTF, then going into Word and editing it myself. But when Word pulls in the RTF file, it changes parts of it into tables, losing my formating. I tried exporting to PDF, which worked, but the text editing capabilities are very limited. And converting PDF to a DOC was disasterous in terms of formating.

The tech support guy at FTM says I should not want to do this thing. Nobody wants to do this. Everybody wants to give out personal information about themselves, their children, their cousins, and everybody else who has entrusted their information to me to any stranger that comes along saying they were related to me 7 generations back. And FTM does not even want to fix this problem in future releases because it violates their philosophy.

And all this would be fixed if I would just post it all on Ancestry.com. I have news for them, not every genealogist in the world has access to Ancestry.com. And even if they did, I have a 7000 person database with 1600 sources and heaven only knows how many notes that would all get stripped if I put it up on Ancestry.com. Besides, if they can’t fix the program to output a simple report correctly, why should I trust my data to work properly on the internet?

I see blog entries on here posted a year ago complaining about the RTF table problem. Why hasn’t this been fixed yet? Is there anybody who knows a way around this?

By: Howard J Lewis

Howard J Lewis — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:13:21 +0000

Type your comment here.

By: MARY JO MUELLER

MARY JO MUELLER — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:12:14 +0000

IAM TRYING TO FIND CHILDREN BORN TO JOHN JACOB HOCHBERG. I AM HIS DAUGHTER FROM A LATER MARRIAGE.
THANKS,’MJ

By: David Robinson

David Robinson — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:50:36 +0000

It seems impossible with either FTM2008 or FTM2009 to get pedigree charts as in FTM2006. I want to include all my CENSUS data but it will only allow Preferred Facts not all facts the option is permanently greyed out. I also want to include all siblings but there is no such option in this new version. When can we expect these features or do I need to lok at alternate packages?

By: steve ledwith

steve ledwith — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:54:37 +0000

My wife has 7.0 . Can i download newer versions and update the program software to the current edition.

By: Sharon I Dickson

Sharon I Dickson — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 08:16:03 +0000

I’ve been using 2008 ever since it came out and now I’m getting an error message popping up saying
Authentication with server failed.
What is that?

By: Rachel Hagen

Rachel Hagen — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:21:36 +0000

I purchased FTM 2008 earlier this year, I got errors when I loaded it and registered, but thought it might have just been for the Ancestry.com membership. I didn’t worry about it at the time, as I thought I could just retry later, I dont recall getting emails to upgrade, but found the SP3 Upgrade Patch accidentally, when I was reading on the FTM webpage.
After installing this, I lots of trouble with my program, I can’t open my backup files,
After numerous uninstalls, reinstalling and manually removing it… etc. I tryed system restore to eradicate the update, that didnt work either…. Is there a fix for this, I cant open it to even tell if it properly registered and it was many months ago when I installed it so I don’t remember checking for updates automatic or manually either. I hope I didn’t wast my money… one of the blogs I read said it is too late to get the free 2009 upgrade , and since I couldn’t open my program I wouldnt even have known about it…. is it necessary to have updated with sp1 and sp2 first… because they are no where to be found, only the sp3. ????

By: mary brockmeyer

mary brockmeyer — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 04:39:31 +0000

Evidently I’m not related to anyone in my tree – can you help me? It seems I have already downloaded and installed the patch.

By: Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:14:17 +0000

I just bought FTM 2008.

I couldn’t even get the program to install at first, and got numerous nonsensical error messages. I finally got it to install and now it insists I have no internet connection, and I’m unable to register it because it can’t connet with the “registration server”.

I tried to download the sp3 zip file.

Didn’t work.

Someone suggested to move it to my computer before opening.

I ran the program, after which FTM wouldn’t even OPEN.

Ben suggested uninstalling and reinstalling both the program AND the service pack.

I did.

It still refuses to even open the program.

Should I return this?!? With thousands of people on line jumping through hoops to figure out how to RUN the software, why shouldn’t I buy a cheaper program that actually FUNCTIONS?