![]() Over the long haul, though, if you write a lot of similar text, PhraseExpress will save you time. Learning a whole bunch of new key combinations, or setting up phrase completion to work for you, can be time-consuming. By nesting macro commands, you can even do such things as asking a user for numbers, feeding them into the Windows calculator application, and pasting the result back into the document.Īs with a lot of utilities of this type, the value you get out of it depends on how much you put into it. You can launch applications by typing a keyword (which is then erased from your document after the application is launched). PhraseExpress goes even beyond this, though. You can use the macro function “#input” to get text from the user, so you can create text fragments which include placeholders for a name, a location, and so on. For example, let’s say you have four or five “Greeting” lines, from “Dear Valued Customer” to “Dear New Client” to “Attention Deadbeat.” You could bind all of them to ctrl-alt-G, and choose the one you want. Even more usefully, the same key combination can be bound to multiple expressions. The real power of PhraseExpress comes in binding keypresses to text phrases, allowing large blocks of text to be inserted at once. If you type quickly and don’t watch the screen, you may well type past the suggested text however, this is infinitely preferable to hanging the program while you manually dismiss any unwanted input. Hit tab to accept, or just keep typing to keep going. ![]() The tab key is the default ‘action’ key for PhraseExpress when you type the start of a word or phrase it recognizes, a small window will pop up with the suggested completion. It has a powerful macro definition language, allowing you to create such tools as the (included) automatic buzzword generator, which will automatically produce such gems as “deploy collaborative networks” and “brand innovative vortals.” To generate that, all I had to do was type “buzzw” and hit tab. PhraseExpress is one of the most feature-rich programs of these sorts I’ve seen.
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