Zenas is a case management system written using only the WordPerfect Office Suite, centering on the Quattro Pro spreadsheet. It is set up for solo practitioners such as myself and it is offered free of charge to any who find it useful, whether for solo legal practice, other legal practice, other business uses, or for studying spreadsheet programming. I simply ask that if people find it useful, that they remember the poor and consider an extra donation to a charity for the relief of poverty.
Installation. Although many functions of the spreadsheet are usable immediately, to utilize all features, you should place the files in folders with these names:
| Folder | Instructions |
| C:\Cases\Zenas |
1. Create this folder manually. 2. Drag all of the notebooks (qpw files) from Zenas.zip into that folder. |
| C:\Cases\Zenas\Macros |
3. Create this folder manually. 4. Drag all of the macros from ZenasMacros.zip into this folder. |
| C:\Cases\Zenas\Forms |
5. Create this folder manually. 6. Drag all of the files from ZenasForms.zip into this folder. |
Users can change the default location of files by manually editting them. See the Zenas.pdf manual for details. I decided to hard-code those locations in order to allow the macros to be used right away.
Zenas generates case-specific mindmaps, but does not contain the software for viewing them. Among those that can view these mindmaps, both Freemind and Freeplane are available for downloading. On the use of mindmaps in a law practice, see my discussion on this site. For galleries of mindmaps for other uses, see here and here.
The files. Here are the files for the Zenas system:
04/20/24 07:49 AM 215,964 Zenas.zip 04/20/24 07:49 AM 44,548 ZenasForms.zip 04/20/24 07:49 AM 83,775 ZenasMacros.zip
| Importing Data into Zenas | 391KB | April 13, 2013 |
| Opening a New Case | 285KB | April 13, 2013 |
| Adding Actors to the Case | 548KB | April 13, 2013 |
| Changing Data on the Case and People | 516KB | April 13, 2013 |
| Closing (and Re-opening) a Case | 332KB | April 13, 2013 |
| Using the Time Sheet | 288KB | April 13, 2013 |
| Sending an email to multiple people involved with the case | 382KB | April 14, 2013 |
| Adding Rule-Based Deadlines/Ticklers | 435KB | April 14, 2013 |
| Handling Billing | 481KB | April 14, 2013 |
Change Log. Since April 2014, all changes, whether major or minor, are noted on the Log sheet of Zenas.qpw in columns AI and AJ. That change log can be viewed here.
Prior major revisions.
Zenas macros were first re-written to utilize WordPerfect's document assembly functions ("merges").
In April 2013, the accounting system (interface and macros) was extensively re-written to improve and automate more functions.
In October 2013, the macros for assembling case-documents that were written at the start of the year were replaced. Though they were bulletproof, they were cumbersome and relatively slow. The new system involves a macro that takes data directly from Zenas and places it in forms newly coded to use the macro. In November 2013, the table-handling feature of new macro merger was modified for greater stability in generating invoices.
In December 2013, the entire Zenas notebook was revised to apply one consistent font and interface, thus eliminating unnecessary formatting and reducing its size by about one-half. The listing of parties on the CaseView page now links connected parties by color.
Later major revisions.
In May 2014, the method of viewing data captured by Titlelog was revised to get around the nuisance of Quattro Pro's somewhat broken ParseExpert system. A new notebook, TitlelogViewer.qpw, was added to deal with it.
In and after August 2015, many of the functions in Zenas.qpw were split out to separate QPW files, to improve both the aesthetics and the programming.
In March 2016, the system of generating invoices was re-written. The invoice form was changed for clarity and then created in a QP template rather than being merged into a WordPerfect document, improving its speed too.
In late 2017, I began moving more of my work to the LaTeX system. One change in Zenas was to generate PDF invoices using LaTeX directly from Zenas. By adjusting the macro, the user can still generate them via the Invoice.qpw spreadsheet.
A Quattro Pro Cheat Sheet (July 18, 2013) is also available here. It contains over ten pages of notes about how to use QP functions and macros to get data from databases, put data into databases, and manipulate the data in databases, and then use it in WordPerfect.