Mitch's Macro Tools for WordPerfect released into the Public Domain

Posted on December 17th, 2006 mitch  Print No comments

Yep. You heard me. WordPerfect.  So here's the story:

Back in the late '80's and early '90's I was a bit of a WordPerfect guru.  As in, "not a Mitch, the Mitch."  :)

I had a blast creating macros, document automation, and document management solutions and was very active in our user community.

I also had the pleasure of writing numerous newsletter articles, book chapters, and acted as technical editor for 20 or so books published [at the time] by the Macmillan publishing family ( Que, Sams, etc. )

Anyway, as I am now doing with Dynamics CRM, I created tools to help me do my job and as a sideline business, I sold these tools to other WordPerfect programmers in hopes of making their jobs easier as well.

My first product, Macro Printer, was released in 1990-91 and allowed a WordPerfect 5.1 macro writer to document their macros by converting them from an encoded format into a WordPerfect document that could be printed.

My second product, was a set of function libraries for WordPerfect for Windows programmers that enhanced their productivity and their applications by providing additional tools and functionality.

With the exception of some troubleshooting I performed a couple of years ago, I haven't so much as seen WordPerfect since I went to work for the Empire back in 1998.  In fact, when I did the troubleshooting, they had to send me their copy of WPWin because no longer own a copy ( and it totally hosed my Office system when I deinstalled it, BTW ).

Anyway, it turns out that there is still a fairly active WordPerfect community.  I was contacted by one of my former compatriots requesting permission to publish on the Internet, a macro I had created for WordPerfect DOS 6.0 back in 1993.  "Heck, I don't care." was my reply.  1993 was a long time ago and if it can help anyone, then more power to them.

Subsequently, I started looking for more of those macros that people my find useful.  I didn't find additional WordPerfect for DOS macros, but in my archives were copies of my Macro Printer and Macro SDK, that I mentioned above.

With my permission, and in the very near future, they will be posted to the WPUniverse by Edward Mendelson for any and all persons to use as they wish.  No payment is required and since I don't own a copy of WordPerfect, support will be non-existent.

I still find this whole process to be fascinating. To think that people may be able to utilize software that I wrote 10-15 years ago, really freaks me out.  Actually, several things freak me out:

1) The fact that people would need or want the software 10-15 years later.

2) The fact that I still had the software 10-15 years later.

3) The fact that the 3.5 inch floppies, were still good, 10-15 years later.

:)

Good luck and happy programming.

Mitch Milam

Sunday, December 17th, 2006

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