Personal Ancestral File (PAF) version 5.0 is a free download from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ FamilySearch.org web site.

PAF is probably the most popular genealogy program in the world, despite Family Tree Maker's marketing hype. PAF is easy to use, and gets more competitive with each release. Version 5.0 remains however, the no-frills alternative on our list, the Plain Jane of genealogy programs. (How fancy does Free have to be?)

Version 5.0 adds features other programs don't offer or don't implement well ... 

Templates allow users to customize the Individual and Marriage screens, choosing which fields are shown in which order. Want the Occupation field on the Individual screen? Make it happen!

Universally unique record serial numbers will be a boon to those who swap, match and merge files.  Online help is better than it used to be. And there is tons of foreign language support.

The new Individual List displays  everyone in your database, one person per line. Just click on a name to view or edit that person's data.

User-selectable fonts and font size for all screens are a dream come true for those with less than 20/20 vision. (Most, but not all, genealogy programs are this user-friendly.)

When multimedia links are exported or imported to GEDCOM, all PAF attributes are supported, including cropping, slide show time, flip, rotate, and attached sound files. Multimedia links in sources and citations are exported and imported.

But PAF is not nearly as feature-rich as its competitors. And users have reported experiencing problems with Version 5. The only problem I encountered during pre-Workshop testing concerned printing a book to a RTF file (for importing into Word for final clean up). PAF generated the file, but Word 97 would not open it.

Personal Ancestral File version 5.0 is a big download at more than 8 megabytes. There's a copy of this download on the Workshop CD.