At MomSoft, we do have a roadmap. Unfortunately we do not have a clear schedule because the development of applications always seems to take much longer than anticipated. For that reason I will not include dates on the description of our plans for the future.

PowerMerge

PowerMerge is in the pipeline. As its name implies it is an addin for PowerPoint that will make it possible to do “mail merges” inside PowerPoint.

We are pretty excited about this product because there isn’t any viable solution (at least that we know of) for such a mundane task as creating a bunch of presentations by replacing variables with the contents of a database.

I have been working on this add-in for some time now, and things are so far progressing quite nicely.

FormsAssistant 2.0

We are in the final design phase of the upcoming version of our flagship product. Development will start right after the release of PowerMerge.

After much consideration, we are planning to introduce four main enhancements:

1. Libraries of form models.
2. New field types.
3. Simplified field markup by moving field settings out of view.
4. A free form filler application to distribute forms to third parties.

Of course, in the future, the first three will be included in PowerForms. Unfortunately the fourth one will not be possible because it would require creating a new PowerPoint from scratch.

To really advance in the definition of the new version, it is vital that we receive feedback from our users.

PowerLinks

I have been playing with the idea of creating PowerLinks to automate the management of linked images, Excel tables and Excel charts inside PowerPoint presentations.

The add-in will serve two purposes:

• Ensure that only the representation of the tables and charts, but not the underlying data, is accessible from the presentation.
• Automate as much as possible the process of updating the presentations when the data changes.

Control Runner 4.0?

Control Runner is showing its age. I am aware of it.

I plan to start working on the design aspects of Control Runner 4.0 right after the release of FormsAssistant 2.0.

So, I guess that I am not going to be bored in the next couple of months.