Morpho Designs

PhraseExpress: Trés Cool

Disclosure: This post contains no affiliate links - however, I am a reseller.

The free version is more than enough for 99% of us.

I spent a few minutes searching Google for a software program that would allow me to save text snippets as soon as I read them.
Portions of email, web pages, PDF files and any other interesting document should be highlighted, copied to the clipboard and pasted into a central database. Finally, retrieval has to be drop-dead simple, otherwise, I’ll get lost in a maze of arbitrary tags and meaningless labels.

After looking at the results, it dawned on me that I already have such a program. It’s called PhraseExpress. It is a text macro utility which organizes frequently used phrases into a single database. This text can be retrieved later and pasted into another Windows application.

One of the ways to retrieve text is by using a keyword, which PhraseExpress refers to as Autotext. For example, when I type reg and press the Enter key, PhraseExpress replaces it with

Regards,

Mitchell Allen

Normally, I want a unique keyword for each phrase. However, if I assign the same keyword to different phrases, PhraseExpress will display a description of each phrase and ask me to choose one! This has the effect of providing me with drop-dead simple retrieval.
I decided to use the keyword *cool for all of my interesting text snippets.

Saving text is a 4-step process:

1. Highlight the interesting text
2. Press the hotkey combination (Ctrl + Alt + C) to create a new phrase
3. Type an arbitrary but hopefully meaningful description
4. Type the keyword *cool in the Autotext field

Retrieving the text is even easier, assuming I can type the keyword somewhere:

1. Type the keyword *cool
2. Select one of the phrases
3. Press the Tab key to paste it into my current document

If I’m not using a text editor, I can right-click the PhraseExpress tray icon and view the snippet with the program.

Now, when I don’t have time to visit an interesting web link, I’ll save it for later, without worrying about trying to locate the document containing the link. I like to save interesting blog comments and, with PhraseExpress, I no longer have to store them in Microsoft ® Word.

Between PhraseExpress and Jing for grabbing screen shots, I can capture everything on my screen but the dust.

Stumble It!