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 such as "Best regards," "To whom it may concern," or even your own name and email address? You type a lot. And even more so if you work in customer support or helpdesk where you often have to type the same answers to customers over and over again. This little utility can save you time.

Most people use Notepad if they have to type some text many times but want to save time 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 create a text template for something 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 press "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 text template to Flashpaste is simple. Click the "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 a text template into 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 each field with 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 keeps 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 inserting 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 the 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 is having trouble 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!