* Excluding facts from reports

[kfunk_ia]

I have brought in a GED file from Rootsmagic. IN that file, I have a number of custom facts that I created for various reasons. Many of these are things for my own reference and they are not meant to be used in reports. As such, they had no sentence structure, or when they did, it came in badly mangled.

What I would like to do is just to mark the entire fact as excluded from any and all reports and any other place that may try to display them. One example is FindAGrave fact where I record the FAG memorial number (this appears to have come in as both a fact and an attribute for some reason), another is a fact called ResAt which is something I used to track people at specific points of their life. For example where they were listed in the mother's obit, and their father's obit.

I have manged to figure out how to exclude them in reports (or at least the individual report for now), but it make more sense just to flag the fact as private (or something) so that it never gets used and doesn't rely on me to remember to unset it. I don't find a way to do that in the program other than on a report by report basis. Can it be done, or is there a plugin that allows it to be done?

...and on the topic of exclusions of facts, I was rather surprised to find Birth and Death were on the exclude list in the Individual Narrative report. This is a standard format in my world. Is there some reason that I am missing as to why this would be excluded?

[Jane]

It's not possible to automatically suppress facts in reports across all, but you can, as you have discovered, exclude facts using the list and exclude for each report. For Narrative reports you can set the Sentence to {blank} to suppress them.

In some reports the List is initially set for items to include not exclude so if you have changed the logic your list may look wrong for purpose so just adjust it for your chosen use.

[tatewise]

First let me clear up what facts are on the List Only and Exclude List options in various Reports.
In some cases both those lists are an Empty List, in others both lists default to the same subset of a few key Events.
In that latter case Birth and Death are listed by default in both the List Only and Exclude List.
However, most Reports default to the All options that include every fact: Birth, Death, etc, and your custom facts.
I cannot explain those inconsistent defaults, but just override them with your own settings by using Edit List.

As Jane says, in Tools > Fact Types define the custom facts you want hidden with Sentence Template: {blank}
That deals with all three types of Narrative Report indefinitely.

For Individual Summary Report and Family Group Sheet use the Exclude List option and just select your custom facts.
Those settings should be remembered indefinitely for those two Report types.
You may need to do the same for the equivalent (for Web, CD, or DVD) versions if you use them.

The Outline Reports default to List Only so will exclude your facts initially.

So in summary, you can effectively make each custom fact 'private' by using its {blank} option, and then only two Report types need their Exclude List adjusting.

BTW: Importing a custom fact as both an Event and an Attribute is quite common.
For an explanation of why it happens, and how to correct them, please start a new thread.