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circle-of-excellence
Free Software
MarkThis Pro 2007
(Due Easter 2007)

Software that helps you automate the many repetitive tasks associated with marking,
so that you can focus your time on generating more complete comments
and thus provide more detailed advice for the future.

MarkThis Pro 2007
...easing teaching, enhancing study...

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Current Status.

MarkThis Pro 2007 sees a complete re-write, with respect the MarkThis software. The new version uses Visual Basic to tie together and automate various aspects of Microsoft Office, principally: Word, Excel and Outlook.

Already a prototype is over half complete, which means that an alpha test should be available at the beginning of March. Fortunately, while the sophistication of the project is high, the technical complexity is low, and so the first full version of MarkThis Pro 2007 should be available for download from this page in late Spring 2007.

Note here that the release date is a little later than we had originally hoped and publicised on this web page. The delay is due to my college department moving to new premises, which has absorbed all the time I had hoped to devote to MarkThis in the Autumn. Apologies for anyone who has been inconvenienced by the change in the release date.

For those who like to dabble in programming themselves, the new version of MarkThis takes an open framework approach. It even provides buttons that can link to your own automation sequences. It is therefore a powerful and flexible environment in which to work for those who like to program. Yet it is also simple and hides complexity from those who prefer their software to be straightforward. Basically, if you can use MS Word and MS Excel, then learning to use MarkThis will be a doddle.

For the far future (say Winter 2008).

Once we are sure we have all the facilities that are needed to use MarkThis with MS Office, we intend to add the code needed to use the program with the free Open Office suite of applications. We also hope to make it possible to use MarkThis in liaison with Open Office from a dismountable drive, like a data peg, memory stick, zip drive or portable hard drive.

An increasing number of applications can be run from portable drives, without installation, and we see this as a milestone towards which the project will progress, before then tackling the challenge of getting MarkThis to work from the web top, in liaisons with online Word Processors and Spreadsheets, such as those currently being rolled out by Google.