Comments on: OneNote and ActiveWords — Ferrari Fast

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 19:19:06 +0000

@Stefan – you actually don’t have to remember them. “Find F8″, type in the word that best describes what you want to do, and you’ll find the AW you prescribed. Do this 2 or 3 times and you’ll learn to remember. The “Find f8″ is critical to making AW work…

By: Max

Max — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:59:25 +0000

For those mac users out there QuickSilver or Launchbar are two of the best alternatives. Also… Spotlight- which is part of the operating system will launch programs if you just activate it and type the beginning letters.

By: Stefan Schulte Strathaus

Stefan Schulte Strathaus — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:28:29 +0000

I tried Phraseexpress a while ago and it is a real good tool when you have to deal with a lot of recurring phrases.

For me ActiveWords is a better match and it seem to be very stable.

I am trying it for a while now. I am using Outlook 2007, OneNote and a number of other applications and so far, none of them had issues with AW running in the back.

The text formatting is working fine for me as well.

30 items seem to be OK – you have to remember them, right?

If not, USD 50,– doesn’t seem to be an unfair price for a stable piece of software that (at least for me) is adding a noticeable value.

Stefan

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:03:11 +0000

Hi,

Michael here from the PhraseExpress Team.

> Phraseexpress is not really free

Unlike ActiveWords “Freemium” which is limited to only 30 items, PhraseExpress is completely free und without any feature limitation as described at http://www.phraseexpress.com/freeware.htm

> Opening programs (..) worked MUCH better

I would wonder what you miss in PhraseExpress:

1. Right-click the program you wish to launch by a shortcut

2. Select the menu item “Run with PhraseExpress”

3. Define the trigger shortcut

Done!

Here is a video: http://www.phraseexpress.com/video/pex_run_en.htm

How would you like to make this easier?

@Apple: PhraseExpress can also store HTML, RTF and Microsoft Word text formatting and bitmaps along with your phrases.

This means that you can easily insert your handwritten signature with the shortcut “sig” for example.

Here is a video demo: http://demo.phraseexpress.com

Michael

By: adaptive

adaptive — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 11:05:10 +0000

I see Launchy as a “middle way” between autohotkey and activewords. It has simple “out of the box” functionality but more advanced functions hidden away.

And free in all senses.

http://www.launchy.net

By: Kai

Kai — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:54:58 +0000

Phraseexpress is not really free – if you read the terms of use in detail you will realize that you are supposed to pay (~$50) if you do anything with it that is connected to you making money. Also, by testing the two (Activewords and Phraseexpress) I realized that it is really different things that they excel at. If you are more about opening programs, files, websites etc., ActiveWords was what worked MUCH better for me. For Text substitutions, Phraseexpress seemed more appropriate – this is what is was mainly designed for. The power and worth of Activewords compared to free little programs shows in the ease with which you can add active words. It is like David Allen’s filing system (check the Connect video where he demos using Activewords for launching his labeler) to overstuffed, unorganized filing bins. “If it takes more than a minute to file something, you’ll stack it”… and thus you lose the power of the active words functionality…

By: Fred Harris

Fred Harris — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:23:32 +0000

Hi. I am a long time user of a registered copy of activewords which, yes, I paid for and I must admit there are many things activewords can do, but in the end after years of use I have moved on and yes phraseexpress is fabulous. I also use MacroExpress which I think is probably the greatest piece of productivity software I have ever come across. With activewords I found that updates just never arrived and it seemed more a marketing ploy than an devotion to improving and adding features. It was very important to me to be able to keep formatted text clips and images and such available for everything from emails to faxes to letters. Activewords could never do this. The workaround I used for years was to create a document with the text or image etc and then a link in activewords. I found it clumsy at best. Meanwhile a friend put me on to phraseexpress and macroexpress. Macroexpress also does not do formatting whereas phraseexpress does. There are countless other programs out there as well. Donationcoder which is free donation software has a couple of interesting ones as well. I wrote activewords a number of times regarding the various issues I had including it not working well in VISTA and was always being told about a pending upgrade. With Macroexpress you can do everything activewords does and a lot more. It works in all versions of windows as does Phrasexpress. The scripting language is very intuitive and there is a wizard. Their website is very supportive. They have continued to improve their product. I have it on my laptop and desktop and it saves hours of work. I have a lot of emails that need the same sort of response with just a few changes like the person’s name, etc. Macroexpress prompts me for this and then sends out the email. I know I can get this to somehow work in activewords but it was always buggy. In Macroexpress and phraseexpress it works like a charm. Macroexpress is not free but a lot cheaper and more powerful than activewords.

By: rwlemke1

rwlemke1 — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 15:36:22 +0000

Having tried both AutoHotkey and ActiveWords, it does some of the app and file launching the Activewords does, and it is free, BUT, you have to write code and run a script for it to work, which I found very time consuming and non-intuitive. To Buzz’s point, I don’t really have the time or interest to learn how to talk to a program, I want the program to be able to talk to me in a way I understand, and ActiveWords does. That’s worth $50 to me. I am willing to pay money for great software. The same comparison could be made between Evernote and OneNote; I far prefer OneNote and was happy to pay for it, even though I could get similar functionality with Evernote.

By: Apple

Apple — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 07:38:51 +0000

> There are no free alternatives to
> ActiveWords that do all the things we do.

Really? I tried ActiveWords once but it does not seem to keep text formatting in the text abbreviations.

Is there a way to save formatted text snippets in ActiveWords?

I also find the general usage very complicated and every action seem to require more keystrokes than necessary. Can you make a video to show how to store a new text abbreviation with the minimum amount of key strokes?

By: Aidan

Aidan — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:50:40 +0000

Looks good. I’m guessing you could integrate this with SharePoint as well?

By: Apple

Apple — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:19:47 +0000

AutoHotkey is another one.

By: Apple

Apple — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:26:01 +0000

Lifehackers Texter to name one. PhraseExpress to name another: http://www.phraseexpress.com/demo.htm

By: Buzz Bruggeman

Buzz Bruggeman — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:44:00 +0000

There are no free alternatives to ActiveWords that do all the things we do. But we have now released ActiveWords/Freemium, and it will do 30 things for free. At some time you will realize that your time is worth more than $50. Our customers tell us we are undercharging for ActiveWords.

Also as to “F8″ you can use spacebar/spacebar to do the same thing.

We have people who use and believe in GTD using ActiveWords all over the world. That said if you have a better way, tell us, and maybe it will help us build a better version of ActiveWords.

Buzz
buzz@activewords.com

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:43:49 +0000

Just finished an email conversation with the owner of ActiveWords – Buzz Bruggeman (great costumer service, by the way)………but he says the most efficient way to activate your active words is by assigning “spacebar-spacebar” as your trigger (replaces having to hit the F8 key).

Just go – Options, Confirmation Options, and click the “Enable spacebar-spacebar trigger”.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:01:19 +0000

@Apple – “CFS” is the actual name of the document that I want to open. So CFS makes perfect sense…to me. For you it might be something like “budget” or “clientlist”. The point is – you can name your ActiveWord shortcuts yourself – so they are more intuitive and you can learn to use so many more shortcuts then if you had to rely on things like “ctrl-shift-y”

I’m not aware of any other free alternatives to ActiveWords. I came accross the software after I saw the podcast of David Allen talking to the owner – Buzz Bruggeman. I downloaded the 60 day trial and within 3 days forked over the $50 – based on the immediate value it had to my life on the computer (which is at least 50-60 hours per week at work and at home).

Sometimes you get what you pay for. But I would love to see that list of freebees.

By: Apple

Apple — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:42:23 +0000

How is something like “CFS F8″ more intuitive than “ctrl-shift-y”. Sounds more or less the same. Besides, there are many free alternatives to ActiveWords. There is really no need to dish out $50.