#Phraseexpress versus activewords professional#

One feature I really like is that you can exclude apps. I personally find that distracting, so I don’t use that. You can also set PhraseExpress to an autocomplete mode, where it will offer up matching macro text as you type it. This is triggered by ‘NW.’ (more on this in a moment). My star system for context: 5 = A favourite, buying a case | 4 = Exceptionally good, will buy more | 3 = Good but not outstanding | 2 = Mediocre | 1 = Poor I prefix all my reviews by explaining my star system: Otherwise, type the trigger and then hit the tab key.įor example, I buy most of my wine through Naked Wines, and one of the really helpful things about the website is the customer reviews. If you have your macros set to ‘Execute immediately,’ then using one is as easy as typing the trigger. TextExpander calls them snippets, PhraseExpress calls them phrases, but I’m just going to call them macros. If you have your TextExpander snippets organized into groups, you have to repeat this for each group, but it’s still super-quick. In the top menubar, click Import and then select the file you exported – and that’s it! Then quit TextExpander and open PhraseExpress. Select your Downloads folder or anywhere else convenient to save it. In TextExpander, right-click on TextExpander Snippets, and select Save a copy of group. If you’re not currently using TextExpander, you can skip this section, but the good news for current TextExpander users is that it literally takes about a minute to export all your existing snippets and then import them into PhraseExpress. I’m pleased to say this proved a big success, and really has helped manage my email inflow. My jury is still out on whether or not this is a net time-saver, but it has led to the more on-the-ball PRs sending me pitches that address one of my stated interests, so I’m sticking with it for now. I thus tried an experiment of responding to uninteresting ones with a form reply which asks them not to follow-up and gives them a list of bullet-points of things that do and don’t interest me. The more persistent PRs will send a second and sometimes a third email ‘just circling back’ to see whether the thing that wasn’t of interest last week has magically become interesting a week later. The sheer volume of emails would suggest that the only sane way to handle them is simply to delete the ones that don’t interest me – but this creates its own problem. The majority of these are either not remotely relevant to me, or simply insufficiently interesting to cover.

#Phraseexpress versus activewords professional#

I mentioned last time a professional application.Īs a tech writer, I get a lot of PR companies emailing me with details of new products and services they’d like me to feature. You can use a specific trigger, which defaults to the tab key in PhraseExpress, but I find the double-period approach faster. The latter is to guard against accidental triggering.

for address, the initials of our building)

Cannot be inadvertently activated in normal typing.

I wanted macro shortcuts to meet three criteria: Four characters, by the way, is a deliberate choice on my part.