Introducing Family Tree Builder 5.0

1 Dec 201029 comments

Practical new features for family history lovers
This week we’re very excited to launch Family Tree Builder 5.0 – packed with many new features that make researching, building, printing and sharing family trees easier than ever. New features include the unique ‘Tree Consistency Checker’, useful ‘To-Do’ lists, better privacy controls, beautiful charts, mail-order posters, DNA marker entry and much, much more. There’s added value and enjoyment for everyone, from genealogy beginners to seasoned pros.

This is a FREE update, which means anyone who had an older version of Family Tree Builder can download the new version and upgrade for free. Those of you who are already Premium and PremiumPlus members can also do that, and the new program will automatically detect their status and respect it. Installing the program on top of an older version is safe and will not affect existing data. The good news for people who weren't using this great software before and want to start using it: it's free.

Let's dive in and take a closer look at the new features in the latest version of Family Tree Builder.

Family Tree Builder 5.0 by MyHeritage.com (click to enlarge)

Making Family Trees More Accurate
Users with family trees of almost any size know how difficult it is to avoid errors in the data – small oversights are often difficult to identify and time-consuming to fix. Some mistakes are common, like misspelled names, mixed up dates or incorrect ages. Some are more difficult to find, like a person tagged in a photo that is dated before that person was born, or entering a date in a place field. The new and comprehensive Tree Consistency Checker comes to your aid, by finding mistakes in your data in almost 40 categories, and it shows you exactly how to fix each one of them. For example, 'child older than parent', 'fact occurring after death', 'tagged in photo before birth', 'maiden name similar to married name', 'inconsistent last name spelling', 'siblings with same first name', etc.. This is guaranteed to help you improve the quality of the data in your tree. We challenge you to run this on your tree and find no mistakes!

Consistency checker of Family Tree Builder 5.0

Tree Consistency Checker in Family Tree Builder 5.0 (click to enlarge)

Another way to easily correct mistakes is through the new 'Find and Replace' function that covers almost every field in the family tree. This feature has multiple configuration options – such as matching an entire word, or just a part of the text. You can control which fields will participate in your search and replace operation.

There is also a new system that helps you prevent mistakes from happening in the first place: whenever you add a new person, it will warn you if it's likely that this person already exists in the tree, and this way you'll avoid having duplicates. Very handy!

Stay organized with ‘To-Do Tasks’
A great new feature that makes organizing and conducting research much more effective is the new To-Do lists. Keep the tasks for your family history in the same place as the rest of your research, add new tasks as you go along – and click the ‘Done’ button when they’re completed. You can associate tasks with a certain person or location – making them easy to find and easy to group. You can even prioritize tasks, so you'll always do the right thing. A new icon on the tree will tell you if that individual has incomplete tasks associated with him/her. Just click it to view those tasks. No more paper to-do lists!

Genealogy To-Do Tasks in Family Tree Builder

The new To-Do Tasks in Family Tree Builder 5.0 (click to enlarge)

Better Privacy Controls
Want to keep certain family secrets to yourself? Now you can be really selective about what information you share. With a dedicated place for controlling privacy settings, you can now make specific information (such as certain names, facts and notes) about family members in the tree private, preventing this data from being published to your family site, or included in a family tree chart...speaking of which...

Fabulous New Charts and Posters
Meet our new Chart Wizard: This clever and easy helper helps you create an amazing family tree chart in a few clicks. Identical to our recently revamped online chart offering, we have a range of beautiful new designs for you to choose from – including 12 chart types and over 18 different styles. You can customize every Family Tree Builder chart to your own liking – by hand-picking the size, color, border, font and background design – and even add in notes and large photos if you wish.

Family Tree Posters created in Family Tree Builder 5.0 (click to enlarge)

Save, Print, Order and Share!
You can save all the new charts as a PDF file. PDF stands for Portable Document Format and is suitable for sharing and printing documents. Once your chart is saved as PDF, you can easily email it to your loved ones, print it using your home printer or order a professional poster print from MyHeritage.com – choosing the paper size, paper material (including optional lamination), and priority shipment. Poster prints make great presents for special family occasions such as birthdays, family reunions and other special events. Now is the best time to order your poster and delight your family before the upcoming festive holidays.

Custom Reports: Users can now export to Excel custom data from fields they can select, for a specific research project – such as details of family members attending a wedding, or a list of all photos in their tree. This is a great free feature, which can be used for planning events and for making use of your data outside of the software.

DNA Markers: There’s a comprehensive and encrypted new area for entering results from genealogy DNA tests. You can also find information about where you can conduct genealogical DNA tests if you're interested in the topic.

Enter genealogical DNA details into Family Tree Builder 5.0

And more...
Thanks to the great feedback we've received from our users, our team has worked extensively on many more features and improvements. We have prepared a full list of improvements in Family Tree Builder 5.0 (PDF) for you.

Here are a few additional highlights: Quick restore: if you buy a new computer, have a hard drive crash, get hit by a virus or lose any information – you can easily restore your family history project from your family site, including your family trees and photos, whenever you want.

With the new version 5.0, you can also do the following: associate sources with photos or scans of documents, enter dates for addresses, specify the married last name for both women and men, see ages of people at any event in their life. And that’s just to name a few of the many new capabilities of Family Tree Builder 5.0.

After putting in so much hard work into this product, we really hope that you'll enjoy the newly updated Family Tree Builder 5.0!

Posted by admin on December 1st, 2010 - 20:30

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Comments (29) Trackbacks (4) ( subscribe to comments on this post )

Bob Burkey
December 2nd, 2010 - 15:01
Would like info on Ahnentafel & Descendant reports that 5.0 can produce! So far, haven't found it mentioned in current website data.
Ana
December 2nd, 2010 - 16:45
thank you for the improvements! For when the possibility of editing the tree on the site and at the same time at the family tree builder and be able to just syncronize the updates?! that would really be something awesome! Many times at work (with a computer that doenst have myheritage) i just want to quickly add new info and i have to alway remember to do that just when i get home, when i could maybe easily just do it online and then get it sincronized?!
Sullivan
December 7th, 2010 - 18:44
Was wondering if there will be a mac version?
jack gilchrist
December 8th, 2010 - 00:20
How do I get a copy of the old version 4 so I can roll back from version 5.0

None of the photos I add in the Family Tree Builder v5 are published to my web site with the new version.
Robert
December 8th, 2010 - 15:58
@Ana, synchronization is something we're hoping to introduce in the near future

@Sullivan, hopefully we will have a mac version at some point although unfortunately it has not been possible with this current iteration. However, if you use a windows imitator on Mac, the software should work.

@jack, if you contact the support team they should be able to figure out why this problem is happening, and point you in the direction of an older version if this is necessary. They can be reached through the support facility http://www.myheritage.com/help/en/
Malc
December 15th, 2010 - 00:32
I've already used some of the new features. Like find and replace to decapitalise names, still working on that. The consistency checker is also very helpful as is checking for duplicates, it found some where a sibling has the same name as another one. In one case of mine this was because the first child had died and another subsequent child was born and given the same name. I think they date of death showed that he had died before the other one was born, but thus wasn't picked up, it would be useful if this was included.

Are there plans to produce a mobile version of FTB so that you can use your mobile device instead of PC or Laptop? I'm sure that it would be well received.
Ronan L
December 15th, 2010 - 17:24
Quick question for you - is there a way to mark on FTB when you have a childless couple? This ties in a little with the to-do list, as whenever I see a married couple with no children, the "Add Children" option is always there, making me think I've still to track down the descendants even if I've already found out they had no children.

Thanks for all the hard work on the program,

Ronan.
Ronan L
December 15th, 2010 - 17:52
Sorry, a couple more things as I wander around the new version:
Firstly, consistency note #37 (incorrect use of case) is helpful but not if you have an Irish family tree! For example, MacMahon or O'Reilly are the correct spellings.

Secondly, two things for the wishlist:
(1) Separating out "No Religion" and "Atheist" - they are two different things!
(2) More complicated: is there a way of allowing the same person to have names in more than one language? Most prominent Irish historical figures in the period 1200-1700 have an English language name and an Irish one. I imagine other places might have Hebrew/native or Latin/vernacular.

Thanks,

Ronan.
Robert
December 17th, 2010 - 12:12
@Ronan, Thanks for these comments - I have forwarded them to the development team
Amber
December 18th, 2010 - 05:56
Are there any plans to make Family Tree Builder available for Mac users?
David W
December 23rd, 2010 - 15:20
Yep can I reiterate the comment about a MAC version - I use my heritage a lot and would love to have the ability to access the builder s/w on the MAC.
Kelsey
December 23rd, 2010 - 23:56
In the past, I've had problems with FTB in cases where a person has children with two different spouses; it only shows the children of the primary (or selected) spouse in the tree, cutting off large chunks of descendants. I was wondering if it is not possible to display all of them?
Ralph Hewlett
December 24th, 2010 - 00:49
How much does it cost to coninue to use it?
Annick
December 24th, 2010 - 03:40
I have the same issue I have iMac and there is no version for it.
Lorraine
December 24th, 2010 - 09:48
I was using Heritage for my family tree until it blocked me and took off the builder which i couldn't no longer click to view nor to add any more names to my tree also to add or correct any info data that need to be done. I downloaded the site again but they wanted me to start all over again, why? when i already had my tree there!, why couldn't it merge with the tree i had for me to carry on. Mmmm alway some glinch or a have some where i guess, did they want me to get the full version so i would paye?.
I'm not a happy customer by all means.
Tom Kelly
December 24th, 2010 - 16:27
My name is Tom Kelly. My email is tomdotkelly@gmail.com. How can I upgrade? I don't understand what I need to do to upgrade. What do I need to establish --- Tools>Upgrade to PremiumPlus. I don't understand how to make this happen.
Martha Bradford
December 24th, 2010 - 19:17
I updated my version of Heritage.com and apparently I did something wrong. I went back to the site and it was empty. How do I get all of my information back without having to start again from scratch
Vadim
December 27th, 2010 - 08:21
Hello. I like your program. But have one prob. Could you please make some tool to convert or copy info from english fields to russian fields. For now I have to copy them manually or russian text in english field not readable.

Thank you in advance!
Erik Juul Hansen
December 29th, 2010 - 15:32
HOW CAN IT BE REDUCED BY 30 - 50% AND YET BE FREE TO DOWNLOAD ??
Robert
December 30th, 2010 - 11:28
Apologies for late responses here - been off for the holiday period!

@Amber, David W, and Annick: a Mac version is always on our radar although hasn't been possible in this current version. A windows imitator would still allow usage of the desktop software, however.

@Kelsey, it's hard to say without seeing your specific tree. Any specific concerns you have should be helped if you get in touch with MyHeritage.com support or ask around on the forums.

@Lorraine, apologies you're having trouble with the site. Again, it's hard for me to say what's wrong and how to fix it without seeing your specific tree. If you get in touch with support over at myheritage.com/support you should find an answer to your problem.

@Tom, it sounds like you're on the right lines already. If you go to settings > site account, and click 'upgrade your site plan', the process should take you through the upgrade step by step.

@Martha, again it's hard to say on this one - this isn't a problem i've encountered. myheritage.com/support are your best bet here

@Vadim, I'll notify the development team of this and see what they can do. Thanks for pointing it out.

@Erik, I'm not sure what you're specifically referring to here, but in general the discounts are for premium packages which are separate from the freely downloadable product.
Louise
December 31st, 2010 - 20:47
I have the same problem as Martha. I can get on myheritage site and see my tree just fine but how do I get the tree builder info back. I did the new download of 5.0 but it is blank and just appears as though I have no history there.
Dana
January 2nd, 2011 - 00:47
Mám také problém. Tak je to proto aby jsme si vše zakoupili.
Peter Abrehart
January 2nd, 2011 - 07:34
Any chance of Family Tree Builder coming out in a Linux version? I have recently changed over to Ubuntu after a critical MS XP failure (lost everything but fortunately had recent back-up).
Robert
January 3rd, 2011 - 13:24
@Louise, again this will require us looking at your site. Your best bet is to get in touch with myheritage.com/support. If you need access to your tree immediately, it might be worth reinstalling the older version (if you still have the download). Apologies for the problems you're having and hopefully we get them fixed very soon!

@Peter, this might be possible in future but obviously requires a bit more work on our part! In the meantime, if there's any way to emulate windows on a linux platform, that may get this working for you.
lana
February 25th, 2011 - 12:25
im so over the experts saying you have to go here or there to get the answers that they should provide....
my tree dosent even come up after i sign in...all of the other pages do ..but not the tree i cant add any names or photos to the tree mmmm wonder why...is it because i havent downloaded family tree 5 by its self....but keeps pushing me and i mean pushing me to download the premium..paid or not paid...dont push your luck kidos or no one will use your tree
if answers cant be answered why would any one wont to pay for it......not me if i cant see my own tree
dawn laprise
February 26th, 2011 - 16:58
i was in foster care i did fid my family now i woul like a family tree
Al Fernandez
September 22nd, 2011 - 03:31
Ford the Family Tree Builder produce a "standard" Pedigree Chart?
Alison
April 2nd, 2012 - 11:39
Like using the family tree software, but on publishing my marriage date of 8th April came out as 4th August. how do I rectify it. I am UK based.
Aaron
April 5th, 2012 - 07:46
Hi Alison, please contact support@myheritage.com and they'll help you.