Passage Express www.passagexpress.com

Passage Express software is a wonderful way to package genealogy data to share with family members. What It Does: PE allows you to put stories, pictures, movies and even GEDCOM files onto a professional looking, self-starting CD or DVD so family members can puruse your information without a lot of technical knowledge. What It Does Not Do: PE does not make dry data interesting; you must create the stories, annotate the pictures, and create information someone will want to read -- PE just lets you package it easily and professionally. What Skills Do You Need: You should be comfortable navigating through files and creating documents; if you can create MS Power Point charts of MS Word documents using Styles and TOCs, you can use this program. There are GREAT on-line tutorials, a good manual, and a surprising number of features but this is Not a Big Company program. It was written by an individual and maintained by a family. There is some support, but it is minimal. I love it - I was able to package 20+ years of work into a format that my family actually found interesting!

Passage Express -you can download from www.passagexpress.com- is actually software to get your family history organised into a nice presentation. After some toying and trying, I managed to get something cool for my parent's 25th anniversary. I would say the easy to use interface is key to the success of this program, but I've used multiple software packages over the past few years and I am not a dummy.