Here is the press release issued this week by Wholly Genes Software:

Wholly Genes Software of Columbia, Maryland, is proud to announce the release of Family Tree SuperTools™, a suite of powerful utilities that work directly with a long list of family history programs.

Family Tree SuperTools brings advanced project management, the industry’s most flexible charting tools, and many other exclusive features to users of Family Tree Maker™, Personal Ancestral File™, The Master Genealogist™, Family Origins™, Ultimate Family Tree™, Legacy™, and others. By reading data directly from these programs with its built-in GenBridge™ technology, this new companion product avoids the many problems normally associated with GEDCOM transfers. (GEDCOM imports are also supported, however, for users of other programs.)

With Family Tree SuperTools, you’ll continue to do data entry in your current family tree program but you’ll have the added benefit of these many new research and reporting features. Simply choose the "Refresh" feature in Family Tree SuperTools in order to update it with the most recent changes from your data-entry program.

The unique add-on utilities of Family Tree SuperTools include:

• Advanced Project Management

View data from multiple research projects in one alphabetical list without being required to merge them together. Use the simple Import Wizard to access data from a variety of formats as received from other researchers or downloaded from the Internet. Then view it in relation to your own data without actually merging those data sets together. This innovative new strategy offers new insights into your research while maintaining an important "firewall" between your data and that of other researchers.

A "project" in Family Tree SuperTools may, therefore, contain multiple independent data sets. You can open and independently navigate multiple projects or multiple views of the same project. In a network environment, researchers can even share simultaneous access to the same projects.

Among its many display screens is the exclusive Project Explorer with its familiar Windows Explorer-like interface. Sort, filter, and "drill down" in order to navigate or compare entire lines of descent.

• Heirloom-Quality Wall Charts

Family Tree SuperTools includes the exclusive charting features of Visual Chartform v2.0, the most flexible family tree charting program on the market. It supports a wide variety of formats for ancestor, descendant, hourglass, and fan charts. User-defined box contents may include photos, multiple lines of text, and even memos. Charts can be oriented in any direction (top-down, left-to-right, etc.), and they offer full control over box size, fonts, colors, shadows, a background image, and other characteristics. You can even color-code boxes based on flag conditions.

But that’s just the beginning. Each box chart is not merely a graphic file but a "live" chart on which you can modify the properties of any object, drag-n-drop boxes individually or in groups, overlay objects, and cut and paste between charts. You can also add additional text, boxes, lines, images, and other graphic shapes with the built-in drawing tools. Professional editing tools include nudge, align, send to back, snap to grid, flip, rotate, etc. You can repaginate to skip page breaks or even rescale an entire chart to fit your specified dimensions.

A completed chart can be saved, printed, or exported to JPG, BMP, or Enhanced MetaFile (EMF).

• Wall Chart Printing Service

Got charts? You can, of course, print a large wall chart to any Windows-compatible printer. Family Tree SuperTools will even print the cut marks to help you splice the pages together. But there is nothing quite so impressive at a family reunion as a full-color chart which covers a wall! With Family Tree SuperTools, you can point and click to submit your masterpiece securely over the Web to Chartform Delivery, a chart printing service from Wholly Genes, Inc. Your chart will be printed on a single sheet of heavyweight paper using a professional large-format color printer and shipped to you in a mailing tube. Printing prices start at just $19.95.

• Web Searching

Highlight one or more names in Family Tree SuperTools and then click to search for them on FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com, Rootsweb.com, Gendex.com, and/or GenealogyPortal.com without any additional data entry. Search multiple sites at the same time for selected individuals or groups of names, including all spelling variations. Within Family Tree SuperTools, you may also specify keyword, proximity, fuzzy searches, and other criteria as supported by those sites.

• Multimedia Slideshows

Showcase your family research with educational and entertaining multimedia slideshows. Drag-n-drop pictures, video, sound, and text from the Windows Explorer or from the multimedia log of your project. Advanced production tools support frame transition effects, looping, video/audio segmenting, and spanning of audio clips across multiple frames. It also includes a viewer that you can freely distribute to relatives with your slideshow.

• Historical Timelines

Display the events in your ancestors' lives in the context of historical timelines. Gain insight that will help your research by viewing their events in relation to politics, battles, county line changes, and general history. More than forty timelines on a variety of topics are provided. You may also use other compatible timelines that are created outside the program or downloaded from the Internet.

• "Accent" Names

Color-code the names of people who match user-defined conditions. Any number of conditions may be specified, each with a designated color. Accent conditions may be based on flags (e.g, male=blue, female=pink) or on much more elaborate criteria (e.g., born in Virginia=red, died in Tennessee=blue, both=green). Save elaborate accent conditions to a file for later use.

• Powerful search and filtering tools

The master alphabetic list of names optionally includes all name variations for each person (i.e., AKA, Alias, Nickname, etc.) so that a single search will find a person who has any matching name, regardless of type. Search or filter the alphabetical list or the Project Explorer using any number of powerful search conditions (Given name=John, Number of sons > 4, and Is a descendant of ID #7). Save elaborate filter conditions to a file for later use. These robust filtering tools and the "Accent" feature described above combine to make Family Tree SuperTools an especially powerful tool for analyzing your family history data.

• Automatic relationship calculator

As you navigate to each person, Family Tree SuperTools will automatically display the blood relationship between that person and you (or another focus person that you specify) - a real eye-opener!

• Other valuable utilities, including a date calculator, regnal date converter, and a relationship calculator that works between any two specified people.

Family Tree SuperTools offers all of these powerful tools for just $17.95 (for download; add $2.00 plus shipping/handling for a CD) from www.whollygenes.com. It is a true 32-bit application with support for right-click menus, long file names, user-defined screen configurations, and drag-n-drop of slideshow media and chart elements. It requires a Pentium 166 with 64 Megs of RAM running Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, ME, or XP. Web searching and chart uploading features require an Internet connection.

Company

Wholly Genes Software is a privately held corporation founded in 1993 with the goal of providing professional caliber software tools to family historians. Its flagship product, The Master Genealogist, is among the highest rated family history project managers and is in use in more than 30 countries around the world.

I hope to obtain a copy of Family Tree SuperTools soon and write about it in this newsletter.

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