What Makes Behold Better?
It Is Report Based
Behold is different than other genealogy programs. Other programs are data-input centric. Behold is data-output centric. Behold's main view is the Report. Whereas other programs require you to run a report every time you want to see your data. With Behold, there is no flipping between input forms and output reports, because you are always looking at all your data all the time.
It Includes Everyone
Most programs can produce Ancestor reports and Descendant reports. Some can do an All-Relative report. Very few can do an Everyone report. Behold will allow you to view your relatives through marriage, all unconnected lines, and even will load completely separate files together in the same report. Behold solves the task of displaying these related and unrelated people in a logical manner. It includes powerful features that let you organize the families in many different ways and allows you to select those you wish to include.
It Includes Everything!
Many programs produce reports and only export certain information to them. Maybe birth, marriage and death places and dates. Often, notes and sources are not included. Behold has the capability of including absolutely everything in your data file. You have the option of selecting what types of data to include and exclude. Since Behold can give you everything about everyone, I have coined the term and refer to the window as: Behold's Everything Report.
Fully Indexed and Hyperlinked
Indexes of names, places, references, sources, source details, repositories and other custom structures in your data are all included in the report. They are hyperlinked back to what they refer to. A simple click on the link and you're where you want to be. The indexes are designed to help you when you research. All your information is presented the way you'll want to see it.
Useful For Your Research
Behold's Everything Report includes everything you recorded about each individual. Their life interactions with their spouses, parents and children (also referred to as "Life Events") are all shown together over the course of each person's life. Events are ordered by date. Ages of each person at each event along with their marriage status and length of marriage provides you with understanding of your relative's situation at the time. Their siblings are included. Their half-family and step-family, often ignored in other software, are included. This information is presented like a mini timeline describing the lives of each person.
Sources Are Very Important
All your sources are included and always shown throughout the Everything Report. The Source Details section of the Everything Report lists all the sources you've recorded and each source lists every person and event that they were used for. Recording your sources is one of the most important things you must do in your research. Behold presents your sources in a useful, usable way that you will appreciate.
Print It All
As easily as you can look at it on your screen, you can also print it and take it with you. The Everything Report is designed to look the same in print and be as usable at the research library as it is on your computer. Behold allows a simple, but flexible numbering scheme to allow you to find things on a printed page where hyperlinks just don't seem to work very well.
Show All of It Concisely
Getting everything is nice. Getting everything in the least amount of space is not easy. Behold's Everything Report presents your data concisely in a logical manner. It sure is nicer to print your data on 100 pages rather than 500, and still there is enough white space that there is room for notes and nothing looks crowded.
Standard Windows Interface
Behold doesn't try to make you learn a new system. I put great care into providing Behold with a standard user interface that will look like you expect a program to look. There are standard menus in standard places, toolbar icons you'll recognize and shortcut keys you are used to using. Opening, closing, saving, finding, printing and generally using Behold will be easy.
Efficiency
It is hard to produce a 500 page report and do it quickly. Even word processors and web browsers choke on documents that large. But I've spent time much tuning Behold so that it works efficiently and quickly. Behold is one of the fastest GEDCOM loading programs in the genealogy industry. I test Behold with trees of hundreds of thousands of people to ensure it performs adequately.
It Has a GEDCOM Understanding
The genealogy software industry is lucky to have GEDCOM (GEnealogy Data COMmunication). That is the file format that allows data to be transferred from one program to another. You are no longer locked into using one program for your genealogy, but can transfer your data to another with a GEDCOM file. The problem is that all the genealogy programs out there each have slightly different implementations of the GEDCOM standard. To be honest, some programs didn't program all of GEDCOM exactly the correct way, both for input and output. As a result, given any two programs, some genealogy data will likely not transfer correctly There is a lot of discussion going on about making GEDCOM better because of this, but maybe its really a matter of getting genealogy programmers to improve the job they are doing. None-the-less, Behold is designed to read what I call "Extended GEDCOM". It will read any flavor of GEDCOM output from any program and display every bit of data that the GEDCOM contains. With Behold, you no longer have to worry that you are not getting all your data out of your GEDCOM.
Behold's Ultimate Design
The Everything Report was designed with a bigger purpose in mind. Instead of using forms-based data entry of other programs, Behold will ultimately allow you to enter your data directly into the Everything Report. This will potentially save you hundreds to thousands of hours by making your data entry as efficient as a word processor. This capability won't be available until Version 2.0, but when it comes it will be revolutionary ... especially for me, since I'll finally be able to properly and efficiently enter the masses of genealogical information I've accumulated over the past 20 years. I can hardly wait!
