My four-part WordPerfect Lawyer feature is concluded by this post. It included links to great sources of WordPerfect help, with hours of reading material, and lots of free downloadable macros. I probably didn’t discuss WP templates enough, so do not forget these powerful tools.

Is WordPerfect a viable option for the future for lawyers? Well, for the short term at least, my answer is still “yes.” WP 12 is a stable, powerful and inexpensive product that has focused on compatibility with the Microsoft world. If WordPerfect ceased operations tomorrow, WP 12 would still be viable for years. Some have already pronounced WordPerfect dead. David Coursey last November wrote a short obituary: “WordPerfect Killed Itself.” My prior statement that "MS Word did it" is a oversimplification. The company failed to respond properly to switch from DOS to Windows and the purchase of the company by Novell never seemed to be a good fit. You can glean a fairly good history of WP from the numerous comments to David Coursey’s post.

If WP does die, it will be sorely missed. Take a look at David Leffler’s lyrics to “Show Me the Codes” (sung to the tune of "Send in the Clowns") courtesy of Carolyn Elefant’s My Shingle. But what is a difficult situation for WP may be good news for us if it continues to focus on the legal marketplace. Certainly many lawyers will employ its “publish to PDF” feature for preparing their electronic filings.   

I’m hoping WordPerfect still has legs. My encouragement of current WP users to upgrade to WP 12 is good advice for you and your purchase brightens the future of WP. For those who have already drank the Kool-Aid and switched, improvements to Word have now closed the feature gap and it is hard to argue they should go back.

We still have more WordPerfect resources to cover. San Francisco-based microCounsel has a pretty nifty collection of WordPerfect resources, including a great set of links (scroll down to near the bottom,) articles and some free downloadables.

Those of you who are attending ABA TECHSHOW should not miss the WordPerfect Revival Meeting on Friday April 1, 2005. Here’s how we describe it: “Rise up, WordPerfect believers, for this afternoon’s tent meeting led by Brother Ross [Kodner.] You’ll witness testifying, sanctifying and deifying what many believe is the One True Word Processor for Lawyers. Meet the other faithful and gather strength and sustenance for evangelizing the power of the Revealed Code.” Ross sells legal macro libraries (large PDF Slide show) for Word and WordPerfect. (But we know his heart is still with WP.)

I hope this assemblage of WordPerfect information has been useful to you. Feel free to direct others to this blog or use the Permalinks to direct them to this series. Thanks to Doug Loudenback and the other WordPerfect “true believers” for the expertise they freely share online and in person.

One can generate extremely useful WordPerfect macros simply by recording them. But even more power can be unlocked by learning how to create them yourself. Everyone in the office need not learn this skill. Your resident WordPerfect Guru can create them and the rest of you can just enjoy running the macros. Of course, you can also find great macros that experts have posted on the WWW for others to download.

First, our state’s expert, Oklahoma City attorney Doug Loudenback, has posted a great WordPerfect Resource page online. It contains numerous papers on aspects of WordPerfect available for you to download, including his 192 page "Common Person’s Macro Manual." It also contains many of Doug’s macros that are free for anyone to download and use.

Here’s an example: "Math.wcm Revised 6/5/04 (replacing the earlier versions). This macro is a math and date calculator to be used in WordPerfect and is most useful if mapped to your keyboard, e.g., Ctrl+M. It does addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and a couple of percentages – one number of the other, or one number of the total. It calculates dates, including ‘lawyer’ dates’. The version which comes with v5.5 & v6.0 Grande Macros (not this one) also computes QDRO dates. It will write either the result, or the formula used and the result, into a WordPerfect document. For WordPerfect 8 or higher only."

Isn’t that a powerful free tool? There’s a lot more available on Doug’s site. Doug also hosts Michael L. Fitzhugh’s 93 page paper on PostScript Array there.

The place on the Internet where the WordPerfect experts congregate is WordPerfect Universe. It is really impossible to overstate the expertise of this online community. It contains an active user forum as well as links to other great WordPerfect resources, like Gordon "The Macro Man" McComb’s site with free sample macros and macros for sale here,  Mike’s Macros and Tips, and Barry MacDonnell’s Toolbox for WordPerfect.

All the keys for you to become a true WordPerfect power user (or force an employee to become one) are in the links listed above. Have fun.

What happened to WordPerfect to relegate it to a niche product primarily used by lawyers and some government officials? In a word, Microsoft happened.

The primary reason given by law firms for conversion from WordPerfect to MS Word is that their clients wanted documents in MS Word format, not WordPerfect. In many cases, that was not an accurate summary of the client’s wishes. The clients simply wanted to be able to open documents they received from the lawyer by e-mail. Clients should expect to receive digital documents from their lawyers in an easily readable form.  The lawyers work for the clients after all.

During the 90’s Microsoft Office was shipped pre-installed on more and more computers while people began to use the e-mail attachment method to transmit documents instead of faxes or couriers. Lawyers then began to hear from their clients that they were unable to open the documents they received via e-mail. These lawyers went to their IT departments and were told “you need to use Microsoft Word.” Of course, as many reading this understand, that was not necessarily the correct answer. There were alternatives, but by then most IT professionals had seen what they believed to be the handwriting on the wall and they were convinced that it was going to be a Microsoft world. So, they reasoned, might as well get those lawyers and staff converted to Microsoft sooner rather than later.

And so began (for many firms) the painful conversion from WordPerfect to MS Word. This pain was not because the staff was resistant to change, but because Word and WP really operate in significantly different ways. You can use different web browsers or different digital image editors and they will operate in much the same way. But once you get past the basic features, WordPerfect is from Mars and the MS Word is from Venus.

Of course, there were some firms that had a more simple solution than buying new software and retraining the entire staff. They just trained their people to convert their WordPerfect documents into a format that the clients could use. In most cases, it was as simple as using “Save as” to save the document in RTF format rather than WPD format. The WP document saved as RTF could generally be easily opened by Word.

But for the most part, clients generally just want to read the lawyer’s documents. Do they need to edit the documents? Generally speaking, most lawyers would rather have the client reading the documents and making suggestions rather than actually editing the legal work themselves.

So since WordPerfect 9, the ability to publish directly to PDF has been a part of WordPerfect. Almost everyone has available the free Adobe Reader to open and read PDF files.

The WordPerfect Lawyer will now share most documents with clients by selecting File, and then Publish to PDF. If the client needs to be able to edit the document, you can use “save as” and select a compatible format, such as RTF. But recent versions of WordPerfect, 11 and 12, have vastly improved document conversion features, essentially allowing documents to be easily converted to and from Word format. Even though you might hear a different story from your local court officials, if you are in an e-filing jurisdiction that requires PDF file format, upgrading to WP 11 or 12 is a simple way to generate the required PDF files from your WordPerfect documents.

So, while I’m not trying to sell software, it does appear clear that the WordPerfect lawyer needs to have at least version 11 or 12 of the product. The good news is that is not a huge investment. At the Corel website, purchasing the WordPerfect 12 upgrade is $149.99 in the box and $129.99 if purchased via download. I’m sure WP 11 is sold for less on eBay. Some may be interested in the WordPerfect Office 12 Legal Quick Start Bundle, which includes Amicus Attorney Organizer Edition and a package of business document templates.

Are you a WordPerfect lawyer in a Word world? You are not alone.

Texas attorney Craig Ball was doing a tips program with me and several others at our 2004 OBA Solo and Small Firm Conference. I gave a WordPerfect tip and he said “Now, how many people are still using WordPerfect?” Taking the bait, I asked for a show of hands and well over half of the audience still used WordPerfect as their primary word processor. He was very surprised and made a comment about being in Shangri La, which most in the audience took to mean paradise or utopia, but I wondered if he really meant the land that time forgot.

A significant reason why many Oklahoma lawyers still use WordPerfect is our resident guru on WordPerfect, Oklahoma City attorney Doug Loudenback. He produces, and the OBA is the exclusive sales agent for, the Grande Macros for family law. These are only sold to Oklahoma lawyers with a license that restricts them from using them to do pro se pleadings. Otherwise he has a pretty liberal licensing plan, one copy can be installed on multiple computers in the office and drop down customizable menus allow several lawyers to use GM to prepare their pleadings. You can examine the many features of the GM at the link noted above and I’ll be happy to sell OBA members a copy. They are reason enough to stay with WordPerfect if you practice much family law in Oklahoma.

But having what many of us view as the more powerful word processor is of little use if you do not use many of its powerful features. So this week we are going to have daily features on how to unlock the power of WordPerfect. Many of these lessons will apply to that other word processor as well. But first let’s talk about what version of WordPerfect you use. If you are still using WP 8, 9 or even 10, it’s probably time to upgrade. Let’s look at Doug Loudenback’s reasons to upgrade to WordPerfect 12 (or not.)

Do you still receive e-mails with broken links? The sender wants to direct you to a website, but you click and get an error message, only noticing afterwards that part of the web address (URL) is not highlighted as hypertext. Veteran Net users know how to work around this problem. Novices usually give up. Let’s spend a couple of minutes making sure you never send out a broken link again.

First of all, there are websites that will convert your long URL to a much shorter one that likely won’t be broken. Among these are TinyURL and SnipURL. They are free and easy to use. I have used TinyURL for a long time. Just paste the long link in, click and copy the shortened one it produces.

But many of you may have a way to avoid broken links that you may never have tried. Open a new e-mail in Microsoft Outlook, type a few letters in the body and click on Insert on the toolbar. Does an option for hyperlink appear? (This only works for messages in HTML, not plain text.) If so, you should be using this method to insert hyperlinks into your messages rather than pasting in the URL’s. It is much more readable to receive a message that says “Check out this website and this one and maybe this one, too” instead of reading between a bunch of URL’s—and those links don’t break! OBA Family Law Section Chair Keith A. Jones just sent out an e-mail section meeting notice with links to maps to the locations and social event, links to the Oklahoma statute under discussion and other links. It was very slick and very concise because a lot of the information rested behind the links. Try it!