Changes

Events appearing on the Event tab of the on a Person or Family Editor are not sorted in any particular order other than the order that the events were added. The reason for not enforcing any particular ordering, particularly ordering by date, is to allow for the situation where an event was known to have happened but the exact chronology is not known. Importing or merging data from an external source can lead to extra events being added to, but out of sequence with, the existing set of events of a person or family.

Events can be manually re-ordered by drag & drop or by use of the re-order buttons on the Event tab. Either way, which can move an event can be moved up or down in the list of events and Gramps will remember the the new order when the changes are saved. The new ordering will be used wherever the events are shown elsewhere in Gramps, such as on a report.

The order of all events on a tab can also be changed by clicking the a column titlestitle. SoFor example, clicking the 'Date' column header will sort all the events in date order. However this way of sorting events is temporary and changes to the changes event order are not preserved when the window is closed.

The drag and drop approach to sorting events is fine for changing the order of moving a small number of events but is not practical for large numbers of scale changes. This is where the The Sort Events tool can be used. It has been designed specifically for large scale this purpose, re-sorting of large numbers of all events, either in the entire database or just those associated with a targeted selection which can be of people chosen by using a filter.

The first option on the Sort Events dialog window is used to define the range of people that the sorting should who's events are to be applied tosorted. The first choice in the list is to apply the sorting to all people in the database. Alternative choices are to apply the sorting to ancestors and descendants of a chosen person or to a range of people selected by a custom built person filter. After choosing who the sort should apply to, the next thing to consider is how the events should be sorted. The first option is to sort by date. This is probably the most likely choice, but other event attributes can be chosen too. The final choices are whether to make the events sorted ascending or descending and whether to apply the sort to family events that the selected people belong to as well.