I’ve mentioned before how much I absolutely love and rely on ActiveWords which combines text substitution and program launching into one incredible application for Windows.
What I also love, as a stats freak, is its extensive reporting features which are pretty thorough considering its just a text substitution/program launching application.
For example, ActiveWords knows that in the 607 days I have had my current laptop, I have entered 5,673,094 keystrokes. Of those, 148,768 were the result of ActiveWords text substitutions — or 2.62 percent of all my keystrokes. Based on my typing speed, that’s 11 hours of typing that the program has saved me.
Similarly, based on the number of ActiveWords command that I have that perform multiple steps (i.e., macro-like processes which open an application, then a file, then do complicated string search and replaces), the program has saved me 8,159 total steps — or about 13.6 hours worth of time.
So, in total, I’ve saved about a day of my life. W00t. Actually it is much more than that because I have quite a few processes that I use ActiveWords for where before I would have had to sit and think for a few moments about all of the steps I needed to take, where now I just type a short keyword and hit F8 and the program takes care of it for me.