![]() So, I was left without a text expander, just when I was about to get back to my writing after the summer holidays. ![]() Plus one needs to be prepared to put up with the above problems. But my point is that the benefits of the free version do come to an end at some point (and I don’t even consider myself such a heavy user, given my small phrase library). Maybe I shouldn’t complain too much, since the app was free and I did get some use out of it. But when I installed WE on my Windows XP netbook with 2GB RAM, it was so slow it was simply unusable. I got to 415 words in my main library (the other 4 libraries had about another 40 words), which I didn’t think was a terribly big database to handle. I avoided using it in Windows Live Mail altogether, as WordExpander made any kind of typing painfully slow, due to some strange interference.ġ2 instances of the WordExpander icon after booting upĪs time went on and my phrase library grew, the application got increasingly slower. As I use multiple monitors, sometimes the popup menu would show up on the wrong monitor, not the one I was typing in. If you’re writing a forum post, for example, the popup word menu would show up in the top left corner of the screen, which was just too cumbersome for the eye to follow. It did happen to work with CT and some other text editors, but it wouldn’t work properly in browsers for instance. Firstly, it does not work in every application. There were a number of other limitations in WordExpander that started to get to me. But when I switched WordExpander off, things returned to normal. I’m not able to debug my AHK scripts or even to determine whether they are the source of the problem. Why did I stop using it? The main reason was that it started interfering with my AutoHotkey scripts I’ve been using in conjunction with ConnectedText, my main tool. I used it almost on a daily basis for about nine months, and stopped using it about a month ago. It just got too annoying, and I uninstalled it soon thereafter.Īs I kept searching, I came across the free WordExpander, which did actually do what I wanted to accomplish, and it seemed fairly easy to use, even though it did not look as polished a product as some of the others I looked at. It seems that being a student puts you in this second category, as I started getting some nagging screens saying that I was a professional user. ![]() First, I checked out PhraseExpress, which claims to offer its software for free to personal users, but with some kind of a tool to detect if one is a professional user. Naturally, I gravitated towards freely available options. In fact, it seems to be considered a premium feature, mostly included in expensive professional editions, which sometimes are beyond a student’s budget. It turned out that that particular feature was not very common. The “Eas圜omplete” feature in WordExpander After entering the first few letters of a frequently-used word, I wanted some kind of a pop-up list to show up right next to the cursor, from which I could quickly select the word with up and down arrows, hit Tab, and have the word automatically inserted. I narrowed down my requirements to one single, simple feature. I downloaded a few, tested them quickly, and if they looked too complicated or wrong for the job, I promptly uninstalled them. I am not a touch-typist, so not having to retype long words with complicated spelling is a godsend.īeing the busy PhD student that I am, I didn’t have either the patience or the time to spend a huge amount of time evaluating these software. If you haven’t used such a software before, the main point of them is to speed up typing, by being able to call up frequently used words from a saved list by just typing a shortcut. In my tutorials on how I use ConnectedText for qualitative data analysis, I mentioned that-following a suggestion from a reader-I had adopted an application for text expansion during the coding process.
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