Mike's NBC-TV stories

Avoid fat-fingered mistakes with boilerplate copy

We sure do a lot of typing on our various devices these days. What with email, social media postings and texting, it can be challenging to dash off replies and messages. That’s where some special apps that I have found for us this week come in so handy.

I suffer from fat finger mistakes, making typos when I enter text on tiny keyboards. That’s why I’m thrilled with Text Expander. I have it on my iPhone, iPad and my Mac computers and what it does is let me enter boilerplate messages and replies that, when I type in a shortcut code, it correctly enters snippets of text, addresses, phone numbers, whole paragraphs and more–with out mistakes. It costs $4.99 for the iPhone or iPad app, which you install as an additional keyboard. The computer app is $34 but if you use my link above, they will give you a 10% discount. Something else about Text Expander – you can share the snippets through Dropbox on all your devises. And that’s a one-time cost, with no yearly plans.

For Android and Windows mobile devices, I really like the Auto Text Phrase Express app. Like Text Expander, Phrase Express lets you can complete documents based on boilerplate templates with just a few clicks. There’s a free version with room for25 phrase snippets, or you can upgrade to more robust versions starting at $49 a year. To get the Phrase Express deluxe features you have to upgrade every year.

Mike is a veteran journalist whose video "PC Mike" reports have been distributed weekly to all 215 NBC-TV stations since 1994, making him one of the most experienced tech reporters in the country. His tech stories and videos have appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, the Today Show, The New York Times, USA Today and in numerous national newspapers and magazines. In addition to the PC Mike tech blog, he also publishes the Roadtreking.com RV Travel Blog in which he travels North America in an RV reporting about interesting people and places.