Another nifty Shorthand trick - CrankyOldBroadOnTheBeach

Posted: Nov 11, 2009

Elsewhere, someone just suggested that you can use it to pop up reminders to yourself on the screen. I've been hauling around a little green loose-leaf notebook since about 1976, with words and phrases I had/have trouble remembering. Many of the words in it have been made long-since obsolete because now we have spell-check. But there are still any number of things that it might be hard to remember all the time. For instance... I had to write down what the numbers after gravida and para mean, because I can never keep them straight. So I just made a new entry in Shorthand. The keyword is ggpp (your mileage may vary) and when I type that, here's what pops up in the little reminder screen: {@REM term births/preterm births/induced abortion or miscarriage/living children} The @REM in brackets means that whatever is within the brackets will NOT expand; in this case, the entire phrase. But if I need to know what the gravida-para numbers mean, now, all I have to do is type ggpp, instead of reaching for the little green book and flipping through it. I added a {@KEY BkSp} command to the end of the above, so that when I type ggpp I will see the above text, and when I hit the space bar to expand, it will backspace one, so that puts my cursor right back where it started. Clear as mud? A trick like this can also be used to remind oneself of the places where Roman versus Arabic numerals are to be used; such as stage 4 chronic kidney disease (Arabic numeral) as opposed to stage IV cancer (Roman). Some of those I can remember; others, I can't. Who's got another idea to share?