Expert: Leslie Walper - 3/24/2006

Question
Mr. Walper,
I am in a small firm in the country.  I end up being the computer "expert," despite being little more than an advanced user.  There are no real experts in our area available for consultation.

We are a law firm, and use Wordperfect in versions from 8 through 12. WP is excellent for legal documents, but I need to be able to back up the various users address books.  It just isn't practical to try to have secretaries etc. generate export files (they forget, etc.), and I don't know where in the WP directories the address book files are kept.  Is there a source for determining, or do you know, what files I need to specifically back up to be able to restore an address book if a hard drive fails?  If I know what files I need, I think I can take care of the rest.
Thanks for any help you can give.

Craig Smith

Answer
Craig,

I don't currently use that function of WP. As I try to create an address book I get the prompt that WP12 want to integrate the address book with MS Outlook -- setting Outlook as my default mail handler. I use Outlook Express for my mail client so have never actually found a need to do that. Previous versions of WP did not integrate as tightly as that, but created their own address book (actually you had the option of using the Windows address book or creating your own in WP). Windows tends to put things in some odd places -- you might check the folder

C:\Documents and Settings\[current user???]\Application Data\Corel\WordPerfect\12

If you have several users you'll need to go to each one -- they probably all have their own unique user profile. That might contain what it is you are looking for. I'm also using WinXP -- previous operating systems may also put things in different places.

In the past I've not found the WP address book to work very well, so never actually got into using it. What I do is create a WP merge data file. When I want to pull an address into a document I retrive it from there. That may not be very handy in your situation, but it works for me.