The reason I made the point about auto-starting programs like PE, is that, unless you do, you never get full benefit from the program.

Using abbreviations has to become an instinct. Every time I type any personal details, or give standard replies to emails, or write a signature, or leave eBay feedback, or use a letterhead, or write a date, or start a program, or use a special character, or create an appointment in my diary, or minimise a window....I'm using a text abbreviation.

Programs like PE or Autohotkey are programs you have to commit to if they're really going to save you time. But once you do, you work in a different way. Every time you do something on a PC more than once, you ask yourself -- can I turn that into a text abbreviation?

The limit is really the number of abbreviations you can easily remember. If the abbreviations/hotkeys are sensible and intuitive, the number can be quite high...

Neat Net Tricks software review panel reviewed the $139.95 version of Phrase Express.  Six panel members submitted their reports, which were in general rather negative.

-cyberdiva (April 16, 2011, 09:49 AM)

I read through the review, and I feel that they do have some valid points, but a lot of their negative comments seem excessive and repetitive.

-cthorpe (April 16, 2011, 11:04 AM)

Agreed. I'm still fairly new to PE, so I'll reserve final judgement on the program at this stage, but I also found the NetNeatTricks review rather odd.

I'm not familiar with NeatNetTricks, but as cthorpe says, they seemed to be obsessed with some of yesterday's big debates.

Of course you want a program like PE to start with Windows, otherwise it loses its purpose. And unless a progam is badly written and takes up 100s of MB of disk space or RAM, I don't care about those details. Those are Windows 95 debates. Then there was the ranting about the EULA...

But the reviewers finally lost me when one said that PE had a poor GUI and a "very high and time-consuming learning curve". If you're the kind of person who's interested in using a program like PE, then you're not a beginner. You use a computer fairly intensively. And if you know your way around a PC, then PhraseExpress is easy to use. Certainly, compared to AutoHotkey, which I used to use for text replacement, PE is child's play. I've only had to use the manual twice so far, and that was to find particular commands for macros. Based on this review, I won't be spending too much time on NetNeatTricks.

Broke my normal golden rule about not buying programs that only offer single computer licences and actually invested in two network licences for PhraseExpress. Even for the individual user, the network version has some benefits if you use multiple machines on the same network.

I have three computers on a home network, but never more than two in use at any time, so two licences are sufficient. One of the computers is on 24/7, so that's my PE "server". The network version keeps a single version of the phrase file on the server, so all machines have access to all new phrases. Impressed with PE so far. I used to use Autohotkey for this purpose, but once you get beyond simple text replacement, PE is easier to use. I particularly like being able to save RTF or Word document snippets as phrases.