Spreadsheets help track Surnames

[Lesanne]

  All this wonderful, technical info and I still haven't managed my web page.... 

[downside]

What I'm having trouble with is getting all that into a Gedcom. Nothing I've tried, works. I have to manipulate the columns and data so much I risk losing data.

Let me try and understand you.  You are trying to convert an Excel spreadsheet into a gedcom file?  I would have thought that was impossible.

Basically, a gedcom file uses a database consisting of 3 major tables:

Individuals (I numbers)
Groups (F numbers)
Notes (N numbers)

Individuals contains:
Individual ref number (e.g. I0100)
First, middle and surname
where and when born
gender
where and when died details
ancestry ref number (e.g. F020)
descendancy ref number (e.g. F001)

Groups contains:
Husband ref number (e.g. I0100)
Wife ref number (e.g. I0101)
Where and when married
Children ref numbers (e.g. I0300, I0301, I0302, I0303)

Notes contains:
Notes based on the Individual ref number e.g. I0100 is N0100 in the notes table.

All the tables are contained in the one file but they are laid out in a specific area of the file i.e. Individuals, followed by Groups, followed by Notes.  There is also a 4th table called Sources (S numbers), which is relatively small.

Organising your data by having separate workbooks for births, marriages and deaths is also fraught with difficulty.

[macphail]

There is a utility (ExcelToGedcom)  that gives you a very basic layout in Excel, working with Individuals only with Birth & Death data. It doesn't link families. After much tweaking, your spreadsheet data can be saved as a text file that presents the data in a Gedcom format after a bit more tweaking in a word processor. Then paste the whole lot into a 'dummy' gedcom you create that has the vital headers and footers that make a gedcom work.  1,000's of rows of data means months of work can be done in a couple of hours. I tried it once, then twice & worked perfectly at the third attempt with a smaller batch of data. But the instructions you get aren't perfect but it's definitely possible, just with a lot of work if you are comfortable with excel.

What I'm going to attempt next is to add Family groups with Maiden name data, which will be interesting.

Organising your data by having separate workbooks for births, marriages and deaths is also fraught with difficulty

I have one workbook with a few worksheets for each type of data. Excels row limits don't give me much option to keep everything in one workbook or worksheet. So a workbook for births include worksheets for Freebmd births, UKbmd births, IGI etc. Then a workbook for marriages with similar worksheets and so on. I found using one workbook with 20+ sheets was a very large file (75MB) that was liable to crash. It was safer to split the load. I have backups on DVD with everything on it. If I do want to manipulate sheets I simply copy the sheet into a new book, so if it goes wrong, I've not lost anything.

Pete

[macphail]

Just want to report a successful conversion of birth data with gender & linked mothers maiden names from excel into Gedcom.    

[webmayo]

I agree that a database is the way to go for large amounts of data, but for most average users it is too complicated.
I am a retired software developer. Over the years I found that my clients preferred simple applications. The only way a database was acceptable was if I created a bespoke application that required nothing more than entering data into a form. For most people, using 'Access' is over complicated and overkill.

Even though I have developed many different database applications in the past, I don't bother to use one for storing this kind of data. I store everything in csv files. I can easily import that into a database if I every need to.

All my data is entered through 'GenScriber' (I fell out with spreadsheets a long time ago).
The csv files that GenScriber creates are organised in folders. Each file is of a reasonable size. They is no need to try and cram everything into a single file.

To retrieve records I use a simple application called 'CsvFileSearch'. It searches through multiple csv files and retrieves individual records.

L

[webmayo]

Organising your data by having separate workbooks for births, marriages and deaths is also fraught with difficulty.

What are these difficulties? I can't think of any. Could you please amplify.
I have multiple files (hundreds) and see no problems.