If you like glossary entries for things like dates and ages, you can save yourself a great deal of time by setting them up using Excel's formula features.

For example, say you want a whole set of entries for "the x-year-old" and "a/an x-year-old" in addition to your y1 through y99 entries that come with IT. (Maybe you'd also like to add a few years onto that age range if you've got a doctor like one of mine, with several patients older than 100.)

Open up an Excel workbook. In cell A1 enter "1" and in cell A2 enter "2". Select both cells and drag down to create a series of increasing numbers. Stop whenever you get to what you want to use for the maximum age (110 in my case). Now select cell B1 and enter a concatentation formula for your short form. For example, if you want to use a0 as the pattern for "a/an xx-year-old" you would enter ="a"&A1 in the formula bar, then click the check mark to enter that formula in cell B1. Select B1 and just drag down to create an appropriate entry in that column of cells for each age, a1 through a110. Now move to cell C1 and create the concatenation formula for your long form. In this case you would enter ="{command}"&"a "&A1&"{Ctrl Shift -}year{Ctrl Shift -}old". (Note you must always put all text and spaces within quotation marks and use ampersands between text entries and cell references. The curly braces and text inside them are the necessary IT commands to create non-breaking hyphens.) Skip down to the cell containing "a 80-year-old", select it, edit the formula in the formula bar to replace a with an, click the check mark to accept the change, and drag that cell down through the 89-year-old cell, and you will now have an rather than a for those ages.

Now select columns B and C by clicking on their column headers, copy, and paste them into a blank Word document, which will automatically paste values instead of formulas.

If you want additional variations on the theme, say a set of t0 short forms that give you "the xx-year-old", just go back and edit cells B1 and C1 for the short and long form concatenations you want, then select both cells and drag down to get a new table of short and long forms. Copy columns B and C again, and paste that new table at the end of your first table

Now on the word menu bar, go to Table>Convert>Table to Text. In the dialog box that opens, under "Separate text with" select Other and enter = in the box. Click OK.
Now save your file as Text Only with Line Breaks, giving it a name you want to use for a new IT Glossary file.

Open the IT Importer, select the Formula file button, navigate to your saved file and open it, then save as a glossary file. Bingo, you just created a new glossary with all those hundreds of entries that you can now merge, include, or do what you will with.

If you have batches of short/long forms you would like to create in three variations for her/his/the patient, you can follow the same general method of putting the universal parts of the short and long forms in separate columns in an Excel spreadsheet. Then set up separate he/she/the patient columns, short form column next to long form column for each, write a concatenation formula in the first cell of each column, select all 6 initial cells, and drag down to create your tables for all three variations simultaneously. Copy out the "he" short and long columns and paste to Word, then the "she" columns and paste beneath, then the "the patient" columns, and save it all to text and change it to a glossary in one swell foop. :kitty

Awesome tip, 14Tonks. :thumbsup

I often throw sequential lists into Excel (alpha and numeric) and let the AutoFill feature do the work for me, then cut/paste back to Word. Wish I had thought about the formula feature for IT a year ago.... :thud

Cheryl

The first day I installed IT and looked through the manual, I went looking for a better way to automate glossary creation, since I didn't have all that much in AutoCorrect at that point, and what I had was set up on a different system than the marker keys in IT would allow. (I still want my j marker key back - it was really nice to have a key to trigger expansions under my strong finger on the home row, and there just aren't any words in English that end in j. If I could use j for my word marker and ; for the my phrase marker, I would be a completely happy IT camper. Ah, well.) Anyway, after I read quickly through the manual, I spent an afternoon with the book propped up by my computer, playing around with how to automate short form and phrase creation with Excel. It took a little work to figure out how to convert the results to a text file that was ready to import to IT and included things such as non-breaking hyphen codes. It was definitely an afternoon well spent, though. :kitty

I had used Shorthand for a little over five years when I switched to IT and already had a ton of abbreviations that I imported. I spent my first day practicing marker keys. I was sure it would take forever to break the spacebar habit and was shocked at how fast I got used to the semicolon. I should have checked out formulas and the workshop a lot sooner than I did. You DO know how to take a program apart. :thumbsup

J marker key -- I like the sound of that one. Did you ever offer that as a suggestion? The IT developer is always open to new ideas. Although, a lot of people seem to use that letter as a prefix or suffix for their short forms.

Cheryl

No, I never offered the j marker key suggestion, as it seemed obvious that the developer was deliberately avoiding offering any alpha marker key options in order to keep people who weren't good at designing expansion systems from messing up with unexpected expansions.

Yes, a lot of people use j as a suffix abbreviation for tion. I ran an analysis of frequency of letters at the end of dictionary words when I started, and then settled on my "marker" keys before I created any short forms, and therefore avoided using j for tion. (I _always_ used something other than just the space bar to code my autocorrect expansions, because it was obvious to me that space bar expansions would just beg for big inadvertent expansion errors any time a typo, acronym, or person's name or initials duplicated a short form. It seemed to me the extra keystroke for a marker key at the end of my abbreviations was a good investment in system simplicity overall. (I actually independently arrived at using one expansion ending key for words and short phrases and another for long phrases and sentences in order to reduce problems from duplicate short forms, so in many ways IT was an easy adustment for me.) The best bets for alpha marker keys based on usual English word endings are j and q. If you don't assign those as single letter short forms or prefix forms and pay attention to what you are doing, it should be possible to use either as a marker key. I decided on j and ; for my basic expansion short form ends, as they were both home row keys. I also had a very small selection of two-letter expansions ending with x, just because I had long used them, and the likelihood of inadvertent expansions from them was very, very low. What I actually had was a spacebar expansion from autocorrect but with ending letters added to the short forms that left me free to ignore duplication of English words and coded for several different versions of expansions from the same short forms. It let me type acronyms as usual and capped them with the addition of one "marker" at the end or expanded them to the long form with the addition of another marker, etc. In retrospect, the system had both pluses and minuses, but it served me well when I was starting out.

You must remember that I left transcription in the era of the electric typewriter and didn't return to it until seven years ago. I sort of backed into some temp jobs with doctors I knew when I became unemployed and had no contact at that point with anyone doing transcription on a computer. I had just gotten my first personal pc and first internet connection, took a crash course in various office programs and then pretty much stumbled around reinventing a lot of wheels for myself before I found and hooked up with the MT network online. Actually I don't regret doing it that way, because although it would have saved me some time if I had known where to buy the wheels, thinking through a whole system for myself independent of any previous "traditional" methods actually was an advantage, I think, in that I came up with some good solutions for some things I might not have thought of if I had known how things were "supposed" to be done. :kitty

I sure would like to try this. Is there any reason I couldn't do the same with Quattro Pro? I have that, but don't have Excel.

Any spreadsheet program that lets you enter formulas in cells that concatenate words and values from other cells and allows you to copy down into other cells using relative references should work just fine. I haven't used Quattro Pro and can't give you specific directions for transferring this tip over to it, but it certainly should be possible.

If you don't have Word, either, you might not have the option to convert from table to text using an = as your delimiter. In that case, concatenate an equal sign onto the end of your short form in your spreadsheet program and things should still work. In that case, you may find it easier to save to text directly from the spreadsheet program rather than pasting to a word processor at all.

Thank you so much, Tonks. I appreciate that! I'll give this a whirl after the weekend, and I'll let you know how it goes! I love this stuff!

The idea of using Excel is a good one. I assume that you can define a macro to create the full glossary and then use an "Include" to use it.

Regarding dates, there is another technique proposed by Pam McCarville using commands, which is quite effective. You can see it described on the Instant Text forum:http://textware.com/board/itmainforum/posts/2066.html

Wow tonks! Thank you!

This is going to be really helpful. My mind is already trying to come up with ways to put this to use.

I ordered Instant Text on Friday and cannot wait to get started. I think this is definitely going to be a good investment for me. I have had to use autocorrect while saving up for a true expander, so this seems like it will be really fun to figure out. I love just playing with software, but I have to admit I knew nothing of Excel's ability to work with text. I am so glad I read this post. Now I have something to do while waiting for Instant Text and the new U2 CD to arrive.

Kimberly

If you love playing with software, I have a definite feeling you'll have a ball, Kimberly! I'm excited for you!

Getting Excel is on my list......somewhere! The list grows by the hour!

Help. I tried the above as I thought it was a handy way to help with dates, but the hyphens don't come out between the words and I don't know how to change it to make them come in. Any ideas appreciated. I'm on my company's program for transcribing using IT V Pro.

Can you give us a few more details on exactly what you tried and in which program? Not sure if you're having trouble with hyphens in dates in Excel, IT, or your company program.

I guess I just needed to do it fresh in the morning instead of at the end of my shift. It's working fine now. I believe the work program did not like the Ctrl-Shift code. Thanks for this board. I love reading through all the things that can help boost my speed!

Me too, Dee, me too! I just love all the methods folks here come up with, wow! And by the way, welcome!