Excel to GEDCom conversion

I started my family tree ages ago in Excel and never used a specialised family tree program. Now I have a large amount of data in spreadsheets and wonder if/how I could convert it to GEDCOM format. If anyone has any information on this I'd be very interested to hear.

 

I've tried Legacy software with no success but your list gives me plenty more to try. Thank you. I'll keep you informed.

 

It IS possible if you have all the right information. Initially I had only the father information for a person, so my conversion to GEDCOM didn't get it right with regard to the correct mother. That's been fixed now, still not optimal, but it works. So as Alexander says, it depends on your data format.

 

Thanks for the replies. For my family tree the info is held in data-only tables (but of my own design not GEDCOM), with other worksheets used for the graphics side of things. But pasting in a couple of lines of the data table here to show you didn't work very well so I'm not sure how to get the snippet to you, Alexander. What's best to do, do you think?

 

Thanks, Tim. Snippet prepared but can't find an icon labelled upload a file.

 

Thanks Tim but the Upload a File button isn't visible on my screen only the Post Reply and Preview Reply & Other Options ones.

 

I haven't even been able to get into the forum for the past few days but Peter's sorted me out on that one and I've got an 'upload a file button' now so fingers crossed. Thanks.

 

The Sample FTree xls file was uploaded just fine and I have been able to view, so congratulations on getting that far.

It looks as if you have most of the necessary information and generally in a form that could be converted to Gedcom format but might need a tailored program to achieve that. Unless some of the utilities suggested by Tim can accept column titles to define the types of information that the data relates to, ie POB in line 2 to denote Place of Birth, etc. Since you have data duplicated from several censuses, you would need to specify which data values should be preferred (or delete the unwanted values).

Also, some of the data would need to be manually 'enhanced' to include county/country for places and to make dates acceptable, ie DOB value of 1882/3 should be changed to a single year depending on the month in which the birth took place. There could be quite a lot of work to do in reviewing/modifying each entry before running the conversion.

It might need a bit of trial and error to get the output exactly right but what you have so far looks promising. Even if the chosen utility does not get all of the information into Gedcom format, it should be possible to achieve most and greatly lessen the amount of manual tweaking needed later. Alexander/Tim can probably be more specific.

 

Reluctantly, I think I must agree with Alexander, unless you can find an existing utility which will create Gedcom formatted output from data entered in identified columns. There could still be quite a lot of 'data cleaning' required before any conversion might be attempted but if such a tool can be found then it might save a great deal of time and effort. Even if such a conversion only handles certain fields for individuals, it could give you a head start for an initial load into a family tree program.

As a Lost Cousins Star, you probably have a substantial amount of data to be entered and I would suggest that any help with the initial load is worth taking, as long as setup does not exceed the cost of going back to entering the data manually from scratch. I shudder at the thought.

Almost certainly, creation of family relationships will be easiest/best if performed manually once the individuals have been entered with all of their data. Best of luck if you do take this approach and please get back to this forum if you would like further suggestions in specific areas.

I use GenoPro with a separate tree for each surname to keep pictorial depiction of families more manageable. If I were faced with this situation, I think I would at least try to convert data for the members of one family and see how easy/complete the action would be. However, that might indicate that Alexander's suggestion for complete re-entry of data is the best approach. Good luck.

 

Having converted a spreadsheet to GEDCOM with my own custom programme, the biggest issue I see with your spreadsheet is the lack of consistency in the relationship specification - column D. GEDCOM needs to know the family (as Alexander detailed at the end of his most recent post), so you need specify (in a way that a programme can understand) both the father and mother of a person (assuming you know them - they can be blank of course, although if you know folks are siblings it makes sense to identify a parent to link them together). As I did my programming in VB6, you should be able to do a similar thing in VBA (the Excel macro language) and we could use my VB6 code as a base on which to improve. As others have said, the ambiguities will need cleaning up too - a programme can't look at something and make an intuitive guess like a person can. You can also take it a small step at a time - for instance, you don't need to convert all the census data at the start if your immediate wish is to get the names and dates into another programme to produce a tree. Have you written any Excel macros? If not, then the easiest thing to do might be to do something simpler like converting your format to the format required by one of the available converter programmes, which could use a much simpler macro.

(As an aside I note that the Excel2GED converter also has problems with multiple wives/mothers - it's pleasing to see others have had the same issues I had!)

 

Many thanks to everyone who's been looking at my problem for me. I'm going to go through all your replies and will think things through now because I'm not a programmer though I have managed a few Excel macros/SQL queries when I worked. If I make progress I'll report back.