Flashpaste makes boilerplate text better than copy-and-paste

Reflect for a moment on how much typing you do every day. What about greetings, common phrases like "Best regards," "To whom it may concern," or even your own name and mail address? You type a lot. And even more so if you work in customer support or helpdesk as there you often have to respond to customers by typing the same answers over and over again. This little utility promises to save your day.

Most people use Notepad if they have to type some text many times but want to save their day by using good old copy-and-paste. People have used the copy-and-paste routine for years. And while this continues to help many tech support workers to answer questions from customers, one company has come up with something new and clever in the ongoing efforts to type faster and more accurately.

Flashpaste is a clever little utility that lets you make a boilerplate text you would normally type manually, save it to a mini-database and paste it automatically into any document: email, Word document, webpage, chat, etc. Just click "CTRL-U" and it pops up a dialog where you can pick the boilerplate text you need and paste it into a document in one click. It's a simple idea that will pay for itself the first time you ever have to use it. As a tech support specialist or helpdesk technician, having something like Flashpaste is a must.

Adding a new boilerplate text to Flashpaste is pretty simple. Click "New Item" button and then type in the name of the item and set its type: folder, RTF or simple text (in our case it's text). Then the record is added to the tree of items in the Flashpaste main window.

To paste boilerplate text to a document, you press the pre-defined hotkey (CTRL+U by default) and then select the text you want from the popup dialog and make one click to paste it. That's it!

Let's say, for example, that you are a webmaster and want to submit a site to search engines and internet catalogs. You could do it the ordinary way by making boilerplate texts of the name of your website, its short and long descriptions and keywords in Notepad so that during submission you could go back to it to copy the text and then paste it to the required field on the "Submit URL" form. Or, you could just type the boilerplate texts in Flashpaste and fill in all the fields in a click without having to step out of the submission page several times. This way you would stay focused on what you do instead of being distracted by tiresome copy and paste.

Another nice touch in the program is clipboard history. While the standard Windows clipboard inserts only the last copied text segment, Flashpaste records all recently copied words, numbers and phrases, allowing easy reuse. The feature eliminates repeated copying and pasting, and is highly useful for software developers and writers.

Flashpaste can be used to perform a variety of tasks such as automatically insert frequently used addresses, email text blocks, HTML code snippets, words, phrases and paragraphs. Flashpaste can also be used to create macros, strings that are either replaced or processed by an application. Using macros, you can paste current time and date, insert commands that emulate pressing the Tab or Enter keys, and more.

So whether it's a simple phrase like "Best regards" that you want to paste to emails, an answer to a customer who's having troubles installing your software or whatever (there are numerous examples of this at the Softvoile website), you're going to discover a whole new level of electronic communication that could never have been achieved by manual text input.

Softvoile lets you try an evaluation copy of Flashpaste for 30 days before you decide to purchase it for $19.99. If you're looking for a way to get things done without having to do repetitive typing, you'll find that Flashpaste is a real helper.

Now download Flashpaste and experiment with your own boilerplate texts. And have a nice day!