Tuesday’s Tip – The To-Do List Part I (Intermediate)

Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.

The To-Do List Part I (Intermediate)

I wanted to give this topic plenty of discussion so I decided to break it down into three parts. After this basic three part series there will be a 4th installment that deals specifically with entering DNA related tasks.

In my opinion, the To-Do List is one of the most underutilized tools in Legacy. It may seem like a lot of "work" to enter these but if you do, you will have a comprehensive research log and a comprehensive correspondence log. You can generate research plans with all of the tasks you plan to do toward specific goals. It will also save you from duplicating your work because you had forgotten that you had already done something. The trick to using the To-Do List is filling in all of fields so that you can use the filtering options and being consistent with how you enter tasks.

You can get to the To-Do List in two ways. On the main toolbar go to View > To-Do List. Notice that you have several options.

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 There are two different kinds of To-Dos. You can have tasks that are attached to a specific person in your file (Individual) and you can have tasks that are more global in nature (General). If you click All To-Do's you will be presented with an unfiltered list. If you click General To-Do's you will be presented with a filtered list showing only these tasks. You can also choose to see the tasks assigned specifically to the husband or to the wife of the couple displayed in the screen.

The second way to access the To-Do List is to click the To-Do icon under a person. This will take you to a filtered list of just their assigned tasks.

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If someone has a specific task assigned to them, their To-Do task icon will colored in. If they have any open tasks you will see an O next to the icon. Notice in the screenshot that Isaac has open tasks. Diannah has tasks but they are all closed.

And here is what the To-Do List looks like:

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I want to talk a bit about General To-Do's now because in the next articles I will be focusing on the Individual To-Do's. I use the General To-Do's for three different things. Here are some examples:

• General file maintenance
  Search and replace month abbreviations in source citations with full month names. 
  Go through the DNA Hashtags and make the wording uniform.
• Global search ideas
  Search the Hessische Truppen in Amerika database for any Glaentzers.
  Search the Poole Funeral Home Records for any Granthams that died and/or was buried in St. Tammany Parish.
• General reminders
  Send Christina the death certificates I received from the Lodz Archives.
  Print off a roster with phone numbers and email addresses for the CCGS.

I also want to mention that if  I do one of the global searches I will add an Individual To-Do for each person that I search for so that I can record the results, positive or negative. I need that search to be part of their research log. I will copy the General To-Do onto the To-Do Clipboard (I will show you how to do this later) and then paste the task as an Individual To-Do. I will leave the task on my clipboard for as long as I need it. I can also save up to 10 different clipboard for later use. Again, I will be going over this in more detail later but I just wanted you to see some of the time saving features that are built in.

The second installment in this series will show you how to fill out a To-Do task.

Find tech tips every day in the Facebook Legacy User Group. The group is free and is available to anyone with a Facebook account.

For video tech tips check out the Legacy Quick Tips page.  These short videos will make it easy for you to learn all sort of fun and interesting ways to look at your genealogy research.

Michele Simmons Lewis, CG^® is part of the Legacy Family Tree team at MyHeritage. She handles the enhancement suggestions that come in from our users as well as writing for Legacy News. You can usually find her hanging out on the Legacy User Group Facebook page answering questions and posting tips.