Notes

What Are Notes?

Adding or Editing Notes for People

Finding Text in a Note Field

Find and Replace in a Note Field

Inserting a Date Stamp

Free-Form Text Tools

Sharing Notes Fields

Default Note Fields

Adding Note Fields to a Person's Record

Deleting Note Fields from a Person's Record

Importing Notes

Saving and Seeing Notes

Cutting, Copying, Pasting Text in Note Fields

Text Style and Color in Notes

The Contextual Menu in Note Fields

Web Page Addresses (URLs) in Note Fields

Tables in Note Fields

What Are Notes?

In Reunion, notes are free-form text relating to a person. A note field is a single, scrolling text field holding up to 64,000 characters. You may add up to 200 note fields per person.

Notes typically require several lines. If only one line is required for a piece of information, it should be entered as a fact. Examples of items that you might enter as notes include...

If you want to record free-form text relating to an entire branch of your family, or to particular surnames, you should consider using the Log feature.

Adding or Editing Notes for People

To record notes or to edit some notes you've already entered, click directly on any note field in the family view (such as Misc. notes).

This will open the Notes section of the Edit Person panel, shown below.

The left side of the Notes section contains a scrolling list of the different types of notes you've added for a person. By clicking on the title of the note field (on the left side), the content of that note field appears on the right side.

You can type directly into the note fields. Note fields are one of the few places where pressing the Return key is not the equivalent of clicking Done. Here the Return key is used to create paragraphs. New paragraphs (or blank lines between paragraphs) will make your reports more readable.

The position of your cursor in a note field is remembered when you close and reopen the field.

Character, Word and Paragraph Counts

Notes, free-form source fields, and logs all have a statistical counter that displays the number of characters, words, and paragraph in the multiline text field.

Finding Text in a Note Field

When the Notes section of the Edit Person panel is open, you can find text in the selected note field (or all note fields) by clicking the Find button (the magnifying glass above the note field), pressing Command+F, or choosing Edit > Find > Find from the menubar at the top. A find panel will appear above the notes field.

Then enter the text you'd like to find in the panel's search box and press Return/Enter or click the Next (the arrow pointing right) or Previous (the arrow pointing left) button.

For more finding options and to recall recent finds, click on the search menu button in the search box.

If the search text is found, it will be highlighted in the note field...

Find and Replace in a Note Field

When the Notes section of the Edit Person panel is open, you can find and replace text in the selected note field (or all note fields) by clicking the Find button (the magnifying glass above the note field), pressing Command+F, or choosing Edit > Find > Find from the menubar at the top. A find panel will appear above the notes field. Check the Replace checkbox button and the replace box will appear.

Enter the text that you want to find in the search box and the replacement text in the replace box. You can modify the find conditions by clicking on the search box menu button - see the previous section for more information on finding.

Clicking on the replace box menu button presents a menu with a Find after replace menu item. When the Find after replace menu item is checked another find done immediately after clicking the Replace button.

Recent replacement text can be quickly recalled by selecting it from the list of Recent Replaces or the list of recent replaces can be cleared by selecting Clear recent replaces.

If the current person or family record has more than one note field, a Find in menu will appear. Click on the Find in menu to choose whether to do find and replace on either the selected note field or all of the note fields for the current record.

Once the find and replace text has been entered and the find settings are set do one of the following...

Click the Replace all button to replace all instances of the find text with the replace text.

or

Click the next button (the ‘>’ to the right of the search box) - if text is found it will be highlighted in the notes field, if you want to replace it, click the Replace button. If you don’t want to replace it you can click the next button again.

If the Find after replace menu item is checked, another find will be performed as soon as you click Replace. If Find after replace is not checked, then click the next button to do another find.

Inserting a Date Stamp

To date-stamp a new notes entry, click the Date Stamp button (the calendar icon above the notes field). This will insert today's date in the format you have selected in the Date Settings window.

Free-Form Text Tools

To clean up text formatting issues, remove invalid characters, modify smart quotes, etc., click the Free-form text tools button (the wrench icon above the notes field). This will present a window with several different text "cleaning" options that can be selected with a checkbox...




Use the Apply... button to apply the formatting either to the current notes field or all notes fields for the edited person or family.

Sharing Notes Fields

To print, email or save a single notes field or all notes fields for a person or family, click on the Share button below the bottom-right corner of the notes field to create a notes report.

There are several options in the Share Person (or Family) Notes window...

Once all of the share options have been set, click the Open with... button to create the notes report.

Default Note Fields

When you add new people, a Misc. Notes field will appear by default, waiting for your entries. You can configure your own set of default note fields which will appear every time you add a new person to your family file. In fact, you'll save lots of time if you set up the correct set of default notes early on in your research.

Adding Note Fields to a Person's Record

To add a note field that doesn't appear by default...

  1. In the Edit Person > Notes panel, click the Add Note button.
  2. Select the note field in the list that appears.
  3. Click Add Note. (If the selected note field is not a default note field and you want it to become one, check the button just under the list.)

If you don't see the note field you need, click the Note Settings button to define your own note fields.

Deleting Note Fields from a Person's Record

To delete a note field, select the note field in the list (on the left) and click the Remove Note button.

A confirmation/warning will appear if the note field has any contents (because this can't be undone).

You can also delete every occurrence of a note in a family file.

Importing Notes

The Import Notes button (the green up arrow above the notes field) lets you import unformatted text files of up to 64,000 characters directly from disk into any note field. The imported text will be appended to existing text, if any.

If Reunion determines that importing a text file will exceed the capacity of a note field, you will be given the option to import a partial file.

HTML, RTF, and MS Word document files may be imported; however, formatting is stripped from these files when imported into a note field. MS Word .docx files are not supported.

Saving and Seeing Notes

When you are finished entering or editing notes, exit the Edit Person panel by clicking Done, pressing the Enter key, or choosing an item in the navbar or sidebar. Reunion will save your changes.

The notes you've added or changed will appear in the family view if the current family view includes those particular note fields. If not, then you need to change or customize the family view. For longer note entries, only the first few paragraphs will appear in the family view.

Cutting, Copying, Pasting Text in Note Fields

While editing text in note fields (or any other field in Reunion), standard Mac keyboard shortcuts may be used to edit text. Learn more.

See this note about pasting text and stripping color, style, pictures, etc., from the text in the Clipboard (i.e., pasting just the plain text and nothing else).

Pasting Pictures Into Note Fields

macOS lets you paste a picture just about anywhere. If you attempt to paste a picture into a note field, it will appear temporarily, but will not be saved when you exit the Edit Person panel. Likewise, the background color of text and any text alignment will be removed when notes are saved.

Remember that pictures and media can not be added to person/family notes, logs or free-form text in sources. Media can be linked to the following locations...

Text Style and Color in Notes

Note fields permit styled and colored text.

To change the style of selected text, use the five Text Style buttons that appear above the notes field on the right...

Click here to see a list of keyboard shortcuts for editing notes fields.

To change the color of selected text, use the Text Color button.

You may also choose a text style and color while no text is selected, and your choices will apply to text when you begin typing.

Clicking outside the color palette or pressing the Escape key will close the color palette.

Visual Clues

In the Notes section of the Edit Person panel, empty note fields will appear with gray titles in the list.

The Contextual Menu in Note Fields

Some features are accessible in a contextual menu when Control-clicking text in note fields. For example, you can look up a clicked word in Apple's Dictionary application, or search for the word using Google.

In this example, we've selected and Control-clicked the words "Ellis Island" in a note field...

You can also add a clickable web address/URL to a note field, as described below.

Adding a Web Address (URL) in a Note Field

There are two ways to add a link (aka web address/URL) to a note field...

  1. Drag the text from the location field in the browser and drop it into a note field in Reunion. The link will appear in the note field as underlined text, ala this example...
  2. From a browser...

The behavior of URLs in other fields is explained here.

Editing the Destination of a Link in a Note Field

To edit the destination of the link, Control-click the linked word(s) in the note field and choose Edit Link from the menu shown below.

A small window will appear with a field for the link destination.

Editing the Name of a Link in a Note Field

When a clickable link (aka web address/URL) appears in a note field, you might want to change how it appears in the note without changing the destination of the link. To rename the clickable link...

Note: Since the link is clickable, you will not be able to click inside the link to place the insertion point. Clicking inside the link name will open your web browser to the link's destination.

Removing a Link in a Note Field

To remove a link in a note field...

  1. Open the Edit Person > Notes panel.
  2. Control-click the underlined text (where the link appears) and choose Remove Link.
Tables in Note Fields

Reunion's note fields do not have special table features as do word processors.

If you attempt to copy and paste data from a table in your word processor — columns and rows of text — into Reunion's note fields, you'll discover that the table or columns may appear crooked. Similarly, if you type in columnar material and then print a report, you may notice the columns becoming jumbled.

Columns of material might include census data, or something like pastoral appointments: year appointed, year served, circuit, district, residence, salary.

The reason for the crooked columns lies in the nature of fonts. Some fonts require the same horizontal space for every character. These are called monospaced fonts. Other fonts have characters of different widths. For example, the "i" character requires less space than a "w" character. Since Reunion doesn't support Tab characters in note fields, you'll need to work with the font selection in order to get straight columns. To do this, first make sure you enter the same number of spaces between each column in a note field.

If you print a person/family group sheet directly from Reunion, you should make sure the notes are being printed with a monospaced font, such as Courier or Monaco. Changing the fonts in person sheets is explained here; family group sheets are explained here.

If the destination of a report is your word processor, you will have to change the font after the report has opened in the word processor. To do this, you can highlight the notes in your word processor and then select a monospaced font from one of the word processor's menus.