The main differences between CorrectHack and the built-in shortcut feature is that CorrectHack looks for a space after a word before doing its substitution, as opposed to substituting immediately after the "shortcut" is entered, as is done when using the built-in shortcuts. It requires this because you're not entering in any special "identifier" as you are doing with the shortcut command, which would tell it "look for the following definition."

As you can see, you can use CorrectHack to do the same thing that the built-in shortcut feature does; that is, replace a shortcut text with a longer pre-defined set of characters. However, in addition to this you can also use CorrectHack to automatically correct commonly mis-Graffiti'ed text! Therefore, CorrectHack actually performs two functions.

QuickText takes a slightly different approach. Instead of having a "trigger" word, QuickText allows you to bring up a pop-up list and then select the entry to insert. These entries can consist of a word, a phrase, or even complete paragraphs to insert.

Which (if any) of these add-on applications should you use? The built-in shortcuts limit you to a certain number of characters in the substitution text, so if you needed/wanted to define something that was fairly long, then you would need to go with CorrectHack or QuickText. As far as which of the two add-on applications is best, that's really up to you and how you'd want to use them. CorrectHack is a good choice as it also has the ability to auto-correct common misspellings, in addition to using it like the built-in shortcut feature. QuickText comes as part of Landware's productivity suite, which might have a certain appeal as well.

Putting it all together
Now that you know how to use shortcuts and a couple applications similar to them, what do you actually use these for? Well, that really depends on you, but here are a couple of things that I use shortcuts for.

• I keep a list of Internet addresses to visit in my To Do list. Rather than typing "http://www."; Or "http://"; each time, I have two shortcuts defined to type this for me: 'u1' types "http://www."; and 'u2' types "http://"; when I enter them as a shortcut;

• I've defined quite a few shortcuts for events I perform on a regular basis, but that aren't something I could just set as repeating in my Date Book. For instance, I have an 'hc' shortcut that types "Haircut Appointment" and an 'ah' shortcut that types "All Hands Meeting";

• I have a Memo where I keep track of gas fill-ups for both my vehicles, using several "@" macro shortcuts: 'gasm' is "@ Gas Metro D, Mileage:", 'gass' is "@ Gas Saturn D, Mileage:";

• I use CorrectHack mainly as a Graffiti correction tool, and as I run across words that I mis-spell or mis-Graffiti, I add them to the list of corrected words. However, I also use it for shortcuts that substitute text that is too long for the built-in application. For example, I have a shortcut defined in CorrectHack called ".sig" that is substituted by my normal E-mail signature.