As its name indicates, this program is intended as a tool rather than as a standalone. Family Tree Super Tools imports family trees already created using packages like The Master Genealogist and Family Origins, allowing users to analyze their data and create new displays. As a result, this program focuses less on the often-backbreaking work of researching a family history and more on data cleanup and snazzy output. The package has dozens of options for presenting and analyzing the gathered data: filters, searches, chart customization options, and much more. Charts can be saved directly to JPG format for easy insertion into Web pages. Comments, photos, and important historical events can be incorporated into the output, providing a larger perspective on a family story. The information can be streamlined just as easily, reduced to its essentials and presented in a compact fashion.
What's more, the program installs smoothly, is easy to use, and makes good on its promise of wide compatibility, integrating family databases from various sources with nary a complaint. For advanced users of genealogy software who want to tinker with the look and structure of an established family database, Family Tree Super Tools is a distinctly first-rate choice. --Alyx Dellamonica
Wholly Genes works hard to please their customers and this program, like their others, is a worthwile addition to your ancestor research tools.
Analysis tools include side-by-side display, filters, color coding using a variety of user-defined criteria, and Internet searches. You can compare names, dates, facts, and sources from different databases. Or you can search your own data for people in specific places or times to look for connections. Just being able to color-code people who are ancestors of a given person, lived in a given town or state, or the like, turns the display itself into an analysis tool.
As for output, my favorite is the variety of highly customizable "box charts" - Ancestor charts, Descendant charts, Fan charts, and more, each with seemingly endless numbers of options. And once the chart is generated, you can edit it further, moving, adding, or deleting elements, to get just what you want. You can print them on your own printer, or send them to the Company's printing service for beautiful wall-size charts at reasonable cost. I've had some done for my own walls, and given them as gifts to family members. They loved them!
Multi-media isn't my thing, but if it's yours, you can create "slideshows" with photos, sounds, and other media which you can display or send to others. The media files can be either in your genealogy data or elsewhere on your computer.
All in all, a very useful tool at a reasonable price.
My main use of this program is as a gift to some of my relatives and friends who don't use The Master Genealogist (TMG). This way they can read my data from TMG and compare it with their data from another program. A number of them have switched permanently to TMG which has even more capability than Family Tree SuperTools. But all have said they like this program.
As for Customer SERVICE, I got it when I called the vendor for help. One relative happend to ask a question on the RootsWeb mailing list for Family Tree SuperTools and they received a phone call within an hour. Of course, not everyone will get service like that, but it impressed me.
