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Worth buying text expander? - the curious one

Posted: Jan 08, 2011

I have been working on trying to increase my speed with expanders. So far I've been using Microsoft word to enter expanders but I'm wondering if that is enough. I would like to have an expander for blocks of text. Have any you purchased a text expander program and is it worth it? I'm shocked at the price of a few of these programs and hesitate to purchase one.

definitely worth the investment - ICManiac

[ In Reply To ..]
The difference between a text expander and saving abbreviations is that you rarely hear of the TE crashing, whereas it is not uncommon to lose the MS-Word autotext files. If your autotext file in Word gets too large, this will happen. If you add large blocks of text in the autotext file in Word, the sooner you can crash.

Working in WordPerfect for DOS, there was unlimited space to build expansions and it was much easier to build action macros (IMHO) than with MS-Word. Text expanders are virtually limitless in the amount of entries they hold.

Most TE provide an expansion suggestion window to chose your entry from, whereas with MS-Word autotext, you have to memorize all the entries you enter or reference a printed cheat sheet.

With Shorthand, for example, you can import an abbreviation add-on to give you a head start with about 13,000 abbreviations instead of building it yourself. With Instant Text, for example, you run documents you create through it and it builds you a customized TE. If you work as an IC, using MPTools 6 (for example) will automate many actions for you like naming/saving your document and creating an invoice.

A draw back to extensive entries in autotext in MS-Word is that if you change jobs and move to a platform that does not support MS-Word, you lose all your expansions.

Having spent years refining my abbreviation entries and moving to different platforms, I can honestly say that it pays you to invest in a text expansion program rather than trying to build your own from scratch or relying soly on the Word feature.

I primarily use Shorthand and it has a feature that shows you how much time the program has saved you. Typically I have 60 hours a month in saved keystrokes by using the program. I work on several platforms and it is portable to every one of them, saving me time and money over a long period of time.

For SH, you have the option to purchase - on a monthly basis S/M

[ In Reply To ..]
if that is all you can afford and it is very reasonable.

Names of Text Expander - the curious one

[ In Reply To ..]
Do you now the names of this software and where can I purchase these?

the ones listed in the above post are... - ICManiac

[ In Reply To ..]
they are

Shorthand
Instant Text
MPWord

and others...all can be found by Google search as I think I could only list one link and not all of them. I entered "text expander medical transcription" and got at least 3 others in in addition to those above.

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