Useful Tool – FastKeys

[avatar user="Jamie Poindexter" size="thumbnail" align="left" link="attachment" /]by Jamie Poindexter | Sep 3, 2021 | Jamie's Tech Corner, Our blogIf you are like me, you find yourself sending the same emails to different clients whether it be instructions on how to do something or quick responses. A useful tool called FastKeys has helped me tremendously in speeding up entering notes or sending emails.What does it do?Fastkeys among many other things is a text expander that saves you time when entering similar text. Say you have a template email you use to email a client. You could copy that template to Word and then paste it into Outlook each time but that in itself takes time. What if you could attach that template to a shortcut and instantly have access to it? The software is very customizable, you create the template you want, and you can assign it to either a hot key or text string. When the software sees this string of text It will expand that into the template you created. In the below example if I were to type “cme” and hit tab it will replace it with the template.

It also can ask the user for input before expanding so you can replace it with custom text.

So here we fill in the name, price and date and it will place that into the template we created

If you prefer to not use the text string you also have the option of using its custom start menu. Simply assign it to a number of keys and you have access to the templates or macros that you have created.For example, an email signature comes in handy for this

Being in IT I have to enter the same commands very frequently in PowerShell or a command prompt. You can create a string and have it ask what command you want to run, for example:

Simply type “control” and it will popup asking what command you want to run. It fills it in and optionally can hit “enter” for you as well.If you use multiple computers, you can also save the database that fast keys uses to a file sync service such as Dropbox or One Drive and have access to it from any PC. If you decide to do this its recommended you don’t store things like passwords since they are stored in plain text. You can try out Fastkeys here and check out everything the software can do here.