I’ve spent 2 days testing my “genealogy planner” at school and home and so far, it is working great. It is great to be able to open the planner and see a list of quick tasks that I can work on or to jot down a question that pops into my mind so I can research it later. It doesn’t clutter my desk and it’s easy to carry with me wherever I go. I even used it last night in the car while waiting for my husband to make a quick run into a store.
I’ve been working on several forms to include in my planner which I will be placing in the address section of the planner so that I can use the alphabetical dividers to organize these forms by surname or location. In the next couple of weeks, I plan to take pictures of the different sections of my planner to give you a better idea of how it is working for me.
My planner is a Franklin-Covey classic sized planner, so I need forms that will fit on a 8 ½ x 5 ½ sheet – or to have 2 forms on one regular sheet of paper that can be cut in half. I’ve decided to use regular paper in my printer, so I have two forms per sheet. I had to print the forms onto “portrait” oriented paper which caused me to have to rearrange my group sheet a little. I was excited to see that the rearrangement actually allowed me to add spaces for 2 more children than my other form did! The tables allow me to click in any box to add my information. It is a Word file, which means I can add endnotes which I can then print on the back side of the paper as long as they don’t take up more than half a sheet of paper. To make them fit, I had to highlight the endnotes and reduce them to a font size 6. (Which led me to puchase a bookmark that is also a magnifier for $1.99 at Office Depot so that I can tell the difference between a 6 and an 8!) I was also thrilled to discover that if I highlight and copy information with endnotes from my regular sized group sheets, when I paste then into the boxes of my smaller group sheet, it copies the end notes as well! If I decide not to use endnotes with these smaller forms, then I could print the forms on the front and the back and still cut them in half – giving me 4 group sheets from 1 sheet of paper.
I’m placing 3 files on here. One is a copy of the form, but I’ve added explanations about the form in red in the boxes. The 2nd is the form on plain paper. The 3rd is the same as the 2nd, but I added an ivy border where the hole punches will go just to make the pages a little more attractive in my planner.
Let me say that I am not an expert in using Word, so I’m hoping that the downloaded files will look the same on your computer as they do on mine! I suggest that you download the instructions as well as the desired form as that may give you some help if the form doesn’t work properly for you. I’d love to hear your feed-back!
Happy Researching!
Lisa
