EZ-FORMS (tm) ALPHA-OMEGA By David Black Have you ever tried to think up an original software product to develop and market? There are so many software packages out there today that almost all bases are covered. The way I came up with an original idea for a software package is rather amusing. I happened to stumble across one of my friends at work one day trying to use a commercial word processor to handle some of our everyday forms. It was funny watching him typing in text and trying to keep the labels and borders from moving around. I made a comment to him about how ridiculous it all looked. His response was "Why don't you write something to make filling out forms easy?". Eureka! EZ-FORMS was born. The idea for EZ-FORMS was the easy part. Next came the work of defining the requirements, the user interface, and what language to use. I worked closely with my co-workers to figure out what they really needed. What evolved was the need to: -- Draw Master forms with or without borders. The ability to insert or delete lines and draw lines was needed. A full screen editor to do the job. -- Allow forms to range in size from 40 columns by 24 lines up to 130 columns by 86 lines. -- To be able to load a copy of the Master form and fill out the text portion with ALL portions of the Master form protected. -- To be able to save, revise, or print any Master or Completed form. The requirements made it necessary to chose a language that could provide fast manipulation of large amounts of text and provide the means to easily display it on the screen quickly. I chose to work with Borland International's Turbo Pascal (tm) because it could meet the above requirements and provide a interactive development environment. After refining the requirement and revising the code several times, I released to the world -- FORMS ver 1.0 under the shareware concept. The code proved to be really large weighing in at about 3800 lines. My wife, Mae, handled the documentation. With FORMS ver 1.0 released, I thought that I could relax for a while. Then came rumors thru the grapevine that the users weren't using my program correctly! They said it had a couple of bugs (not my program!). About this time I received the newest release of Turbo Pascal, ver 3.0, from Borland. I fixed all the bugs in FORMS and added a few enhancements under Turbo Pascal ver 3.0 (enhancements like color windows and more text editing capability) and released FORMS ver 1.1. A couple of weeks after the release of FORMS ver 1.1, I learned that mysterious "file not found" errors started showing up in FORMS. After thoroughly checking my code to make sure there weren't any errors to cause this, I quickly got on the phone to Borland International and described the problem. They acknowledged the problem was with Turbo Pascal ver 3.0 and said they would send me a version with the bug fixed. I am still waiting for the bug free version of Turbo Pascal 3.0. I quickly switched back to Turbo Pascal ver 2.0 and started with the enhancements again. In the meantime my wife introduced me to Ed Ejzak of Enerco Associates. He was all excited about my program and got his company to help me market it. Hey guys, us programmers kind of get lost without user feedback and good business advice to keep us in touch with reality. Ed made numerous suggestions for enhancements to EZ-FORMS (FORMS) and how to handle the shareware marketing. Do you know how much time I spent deciding which forms to include and typing in the 38 Master forms that are included in the EZ-FORMS package? My office co-workers are very pleased with EZ-FORMS except... They want more capability, like word wrap and more text editing in the Completed form mode. Isn't that the way it always goes? Well anyway, the current version of EZ-FORMS took Turbo Pascal to the maximum code size (64K) without overlays. I am currently writing a more powerful version of EZ-FORMS ver A (5/85) that will allow me to add more features without the 64K limit on code size. I plan to include word wrap, block moves, block copies, and much more capability. My associates and I are also adding many pre-defined forms (4+ diskettes) that should handle almost any situation in business, legal, financial, real estate, engineering, corporate, personnel, etc. situations. We also have a forms exchange service for our fully registered users. Our users can send in forms they have developed and in return get forms developed by other users (sort of a "shareware" library). This will guarantee a never ending supply of new forms in a variety of areas at a very reasonable price. EZ-FORMS is unique. I know of no other software package that can provide this capability. If you would like to have a copy for evaluation see your local PC club software librarian or a local bulletin board. If they don't have EZ-FORMS rev A then send $40 (plus $4 shipping and handling) for full registration or $10 (plus $4 shipping and handling) for a limited evaluation copy to: Enerco Associates 403 NASA Road 1 East, Suite 377 Webster, TX 77598 PH (713) 482-0210 Full registration provides you with a unique registration number, $10 paid to you when someone registers one of your copies, free updates for one year, bound printed manual, phone support, newsletter, and membership in our form exchange service. Developing EZ-FORMS has been a real challenge. In some respects the coding of the program was the easiest. It has been a learning experience to work with the users of EZ-FORMS and to see what they really need, not what they sometimes say they need. I hope EZ-FORMS proves useful. If you have any comments, good or bad, about EZ-FORMS then please pass them to me thru the above address. eful.