Hotstrings from AutoHotKey are an amazing time saver! If you’re not using them now, stop what you’re doing because they are very easy to use and save you a lot of time on a daily basis!
AutoCorrect’s “Replace text as you type” feature is great for fixing typos, but you can save much more time by creating AutoCorrect entries for text items that you …
Windows Autocorrect– Auto-replace an abbreviation with full text in any windows program
Years ago I realized I was frequently typing the same thing over and over. For a while I used autocorrect in Microsoft Word which was helpful but had limitations (one huge one is that it only worked in Word). AutoHotKey is a free scripting program that allows you to do an amazing amount of things; one of which is how to use Hotstrings to autocorrect text in any windows program via Hotstrings.
If you want to learn more about HotStrings, check out our Udemy course on HotStrings here
I have hundreds of Hotstrings which allow me to type a few letters and have them, automatically, replaced with the full word, sentence, paragraph, etc. Below is a simple example where I want to type my main website domain. Instead of typing the entire thing out I just type tac. which is quickly replaced with https://the-automator.com
The second example is one where I want to have line-breaks inserted (This is my template when starting a new AutoHotKey script.) I simply type tst. and the following “magically” appears in its place via windows autocorrect.
The below video outlines how I use hotstrings to reduce the amount of mundane work that I have to do. It is amazing how much time you can save once you get used to using them! Remember your Hotstrings (windows autocorrect) will work in any Windows program! Did I mention it was free? What more could you ask for?
Windows autocorrect is just one of many amazing things you can do with AutoHotKey however hotstrings is a great, easy, way to start down the path of automation and efficiency!
Microsoft Word has a very powerful search / replace feature (and a bit easier for most to play with than a Regular Expression). One of the things I use it for is to select email addresses from a a document.
The following needs to be added to the search field: [A-Za-z0-9-._]{2,}[@]{1}[A-Za-z0-9-._][A-Za-z0-9-._][@]1[A-Za-z0-9-._]
Another video I did demonstrating the usefulness of Hotstrings can be seen here where I demonstrate how I use it with SPSS to crank-out reports.
