Editing WordStar (section)

== Add-ons and companion products ==
{{Further|MicroPro International#Products}}
MailMerge was an add-on program (becoming integrated from WordStar 4 onwards) which facilitated the ''merge printing'' of bulk mailings, such as business letters to clients. Two files were required:
# a data file, being a list of recipients stored in a non-document, comma-delimited plain ASCII text file, typically named ''Clients.dat'' (although WordStar had no requirement for a specific file extension). Each subsequent line of text in the file would be dedicated to a particular client, with name and address details separated on the line dedicated to a client by commas, read left to right. For example: Mr., Michael, Smith, 7 Oakland Drive,&nbsp;... WordStar would also access Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet files (*.wk1) for this data and if the data contained flags to start and stop WordStar processing the data then flags could be set so that certain 'clients' are omitted from the output stream.
# a master document containing the text of the letter, using standard paragraphs (a.k.a. [[boilerplate text]]) as required. These would be mixed and matched as needed, and where appropriate, paragraphs could be inserted through external reference to subordinate documents.

The writer would insert placeholders delimited by ampersands into the master document, e.g., &TITLE&, &INITIAL&, &SURNAME&, &ADDRESS1&. In each copy of the letter the placeholders would be replaced with strings read from the DAT file. Mass mailings could thereby be prepared with each letter copy ''individually'' addressed.

Other add-on programs included SpellStar, a [[spell checker]] program, later incorporated as a direct part of the WordStar program; and DataStar, a program whose purpose was specifically to expedite creating of the data files used for merge printing. These were revolutionary features for personal computer users during the early-to-mid-1980s. A companion spreadsheet, CalcStar, was also produced using a somewhat WordStar-like interface; collectively, WordStar (word processing), DataStar/ReportStar (database management, a.k.a. InfoStar), and CalcStar (spreadsheet) comprised StarBurst, the first-ever [[office suite]] of personal computer programs.<ref name=Dvorak1998>{{cite journal | last=Dvorak | first=John C. | authorlink=John C. Dvorak | date=July 1998 | url=https://www.dvorak.org/blog/whatever-happened-to-wordstar-2/ | title=What Ever Happened to... WordStar? | journal=Computer Shopper | publisher=SX2 Media Labs | volume=18 | issue=7 | page=430 | archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20081213193028/https://www.dvorak.org/blog/whatever-happened-to-wordstar-2/ | archivedate=December 13, 2008}}</ref>

As a product enhancement, in the late 1980s WordStar 5 came bundled with PC-Outline, a popular [[DOS]] [[outliner]] then available from Brown Bag Software, Inc. in California. PC-Outline text had to be exported to a WordStar-format file, as the programs were not developed to be internally compatible.<ref>[http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue124/P198_1_REVIEWS_WORDSTAR_6.0.php Review: Wordstar 6.0]. Atarimagazines.com. Retrieved on July 17, 2013.</ref>