Date Entry changed?
Date entry. As I remember, previously when I entered "a 1782" in a date field it would give me "about 1782". Now it gives me "1782". So I have to enter "about 1782". Please restore it back to when "a 1782" would display "about 1782".
Answers
-
The problem is, many sources use "a" before dates to mean ante "before" (in Latin).
1 -
You can use "c" (circa meaning "approximately" or "about" in Latin) for this shortcut. There are some Help Centre articles on date entry but, bizarrely, they don't mention the "c" shortcut:
1 -
I feel there are far more important issues attached to this matter than now having to type in four extra characters. I had already discovered the c (circa) workaround but don't find any problem in typing a full word ("about").
The more important matter is that when working on a pedigree (landscape) page the date shows (in this example) just as "1782", so there is no indication this is an estimated date. I would only use an "about" prefix if I was quite sure an event took place, say, no more than 5 years either side. Unfortunately, many users base "about" on the idea (again using this example) that a person who married in 1803 would have been aged around 21 at the time and thus born around 1782. Worse still is the use of the "before" or "after" options. Many times I have looked on a landscape chart and seen an individual appearing to have died in 1841, only to find from the their profile page that a user had inputted "after 1841" just because they had not found any records for that person beyond the 1841 census.
To me, this is a far more important matter for the developers to look at. Typing those four extra letters is surely no real effort, compared to the matter that an "about" ("before" or after") does not appear on other Family Tree pages / views, often leading us to make totally misleading conclusions about an event date.
2 -
BTW - Just discovered that "ab 1782" (with or without a space) allows for an "about 1782" entry, if you don't wish to type the full word.
3 -
@Paul W You should send this in to the Suggest an Idea zone. It will get sent on to the appropriate developers there.
0 -
@AnneLoForteWillson what Paul is talking about sounds like a bug report rather than an enhancement request to me, are we supposed to report bugs through the (in my opinion currently seriously flawed) Suggest an Idea process also?
0
