Thursday, March 24, 2016

How Text Expander Software Can Save You 100's of Hours a Year

How keyboard macro programs can increase productivity through typing shortcuts

If you work as a legal/medical transcriptionist, eBay reseller, customer relations manager, data entry clerk, programmer, or web designer - a simple text expander program can help you save many hours a week by creating text typing shortcuts to fill in common phrases or code strings in your workflow. Text expansion is a bit like auto-complete on a cell phone/Google — it allows you to enter a long string of text with a shorter string. When you’re using a text expansion app, it monitors your typing, and whenever you type a specific sequence of letters, it will replace those letters with a predefined piece of text. It could be your name, your address, or a full paragraph that you’ve saved.

Think of how many things you type over and over on a regular basis and the number of seconds it takes to write each phrase - text expansion allows me to type a few letters instead of that whole string of characters. Do the math - if you are in the medical transcription field, you are often typing long words that are hard to spell (and often don't register correctly with spell check). With a short setup period with the software, you can have several common diagnoses and descriptive sentences ready to go - a paragraph that would have taken a minute or two to type up can now be written in a few seconds!

With transcription usage covered, a couple of other examples:

eBay Seller:

Have a couple of different templates or common descriptions for your items? Save each one with a different string, and halve the time needed to make each listing and get more products up and running.

Customer Relations (CRM):

If you manage support emails or a business Facebook/Twitter account, you can have frequently used responses (Thank you for the comment, please leave us a review here; Sorry to hear about your issue with our product! For technical support, please go here; etc) saved and ready to go. It will certainly make qualifying for the Facebook Page Responsiveness Badge easier for your business page!

Data Entry/Programming/Web Design:

Have a particular formula, recursive loop, file location, or coding template that is referred to multiple times in your project? Text expanders don't just store letters, you can have common code snippets saved as well to save on development time.

Give our highly rated text expander a try: FastFox Text Expander for Windows and Mac

Features:

Text Expansion and Image Insertion
  • Expand keyboard shortcuts into words or phrases
  • Create an unlimited number of text shortcuts
  • No limit on expanded text length
  • Save plain text or formatted rich text expansions
  • Create a shortcut to insert images 
Shortcut and Macro Creation
  • Define macros for actions using special keys
    (i.e., Ctrl, Alt, and Shift)
  • Create shortcuts from multiple key commands
  • Use keyboard macros within any program
  • Utilize a shared shortcut file on a network to standardize stock text across your business
  • Back up and restore shortcut data and groups 
Intuitive Autocomplete
  • FastFox learns your most commonly typed phrases and suggests them to you as you type, so you can select and insert text on the fly.
For a quick lesson on using FastFox, read this tutorial from WikiHow

Click on the link to download or purchase:

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