FTM descendant report adjustments

[andrewalston]

I'm not an FTM user, but I'm trying to help someone who is (FTM2019).

The aim is to produce a box diagram a pair of parents, with their children - just the two generations.

FTM insists on producing the report with the childrens' spouses as well. This means that the report becomes very wide - too wide for the purpose.

There is a tick box to turn off the parent's spouse, but NOT those of the children. 

FTM lets you remove individual boxes from the report, but it does not then redraw it; the space is still used. Attempting to redraw things just puts those removed spouses back in again.

Is there a way to get the report back to a sensible size, or should she resort to drawing it in some other software?

[Pheno]

Andrew, I have the FTM companion guide for FTM2017.

In the section on chart layouts there is a para re 'Include spouses of primary individual' which says it displays each husband or wife of the person selected for the chart.  I don't know whether this means the possible numerous spouses of the starting individual or those of the primary individual's descendants too.  However, what it does say is that this option is not an option in the Book layout for all charts, otherwise it should be a drop down option in the editing panel when you open the chart you want to change.

Maybe you have the chart in Book option?

Pheno

[Jomot]

I struggle with the charts too – none of them seem to quite do what I want – but this seems to produce what you’re after:

Select one of the children and then select ‘Vertical Pedigree Chart’.

Set the Generations to 1, and select ‘Include Siblings of Primary Individual’.

This should give you just the two parents and their children, then you can play around with other settings to make it fit the way you want, eg:

On the ‘Advanced’ button next to Layout there are options for Horizontal and Vertical spacing, which you can use to make your chart fit the page, or alternatively on the Spacing button (under Layout) there are some pre-set options (collapsed, squished etc).  You can also use the little icons under ‘Vertical Pedigree Chart Options’ to choose things like landscape or portrait, font size/colour etc.

The layout isn’t perfect as normally the parents would be centred, but otherwise this should give you what you’re after.

[martin hooper]

You can modify any chart to remove unwanted people by right clicking on the person to reveal a submenu. One of the options will be to remove the person. If there are too many then you could set up a filter to identify all the people you want to include in the chart.

Martin

[andrewalston]

Yes, I found the options to remove the parent's spouse (which needs to be left in).

Removing boxes from the report just leaves gaps where they used to be; it does not make the report less wide.

Must say I never thought of charting ancestors when what you are after are descendants!

I'll give that a go when I see the researcher this week. It sounds very promising!