When you have captured text into AceText, and arranged it into collections, you can unleash AceText’s true power: the ability to instantly locate any piece of text, and transfer it into any Windows application.
If your clips have descriptive labels and are neatly organized into folders, you can easily pick the clip you want by clicking on it with the mouse in the tree view. When you have your hands on the keyboard, press Ctrl+Up Arrow or Ctrl+Down Arrow on the keyboard to walk through the clips. Collapsed folders will be expanded.
Depending on the choice you made in the Operation Preferences, double-clicking the selected clip or pressing Ctrl+Enter on the keyboard will place the clip onto the Windows clipboard, ready to be pasted into any application, or directly send it to the application you were last working with.
If the software you use supports inter-application drag and drop, you can click on a clip’s label in the list, hold the mouse button down, and move the mouse pointer into the document you are working with. Release the mouse button, and the clip’s text will be inserted into the document.
When working with a limited set of clips, this method is quick and easy. E.g. when creating a document that has many identical elements, such as HTML tags in a web page, you can open AceText and your document editor side by side. Just double-click items to send them into the editor software, as you create the document. The AceText Tower is well-suited in this situation, enabling you to see the maximum number of clips with AceText taking up little screen space.
When you add a clip to a collection, you will notice it has a field labeled “AceType”. In this field, you can enter a memorable abbreviation or mnemonic. E.g. you could assign “ty” to a clip with an elaborate “thank you for your business” message, and “pl” for a clip with your company’s price list and purchasing options.
To instantly insert a clip into a document, press the AceType hotkey (Win+Alt+A by default) while working with the document in another application. AceText will pop up with an extra AceType field shown above the list of clips. The list of clips will show the clips along with their AceType abbreviations. Clips that do not have abbreviations will be hidden. Type in the abbreviation of the clip you want, and press Enter. E.g. when composing an email response to a customer’s inquiry, press Win+Alt+A, T, Y and Enter, to insert your thank you message into the email. Writing polite and elaborate responses to common questions has never been easier.
If you forgot the abbreviation you assigned to the clip you want, type in the first few letters of what you guess to be the abbreviation. The list of clips will reduce to clips with AceType abbreviations starting with those letters. Press Backspace on the keyboard to back up and try again. Of course, all the other methods of locating a clip still work while in AceType mode. And you can still double-click a clip to insert it into your document, email message, etc.
Pressing the AceType hotkey while working with AceText also shows the AceType field above the list of clips. It will let you look up a clip using its AceType abbreviation in the same way. But the clip won’t be sent to another application.
Use the search box and buttons at the bottom of the AceText Editor and AceText Tower to search through and filter a collection. Type in a word or phrase, and click the Find Previous or Find Next button to search for a clip containing the word. You can also press F3 and Shift+F3 on the keyboard to search. The label, abbreviation and text of each clip are all searched through. If no clip can be found, nothing will happen when you click one of the search buttons.
When you click the Filter button or press Ctrl+F3, the list will only show those clips that contain the word or phrase you entered in the search box. If you change the text in the search box, the list of clips is automatically updated to show only those clips containing the new search text. Click the Filter button again to turn off the filter and make the list show all clips again.
If you opened several collections, you can search all of them at once by turning on the “all clips in all collections” search option.
AceType, discussed above, is a particularly powerful way to look up and reuse a clip in one go. You do need to assign abbreviations to your clips beforehand. If you did not do so, use AcePaste instead of AceType. The default hotkey is Win+Alt+V. Press it while working with another application, and AceText will pop up. Look up the clip you want, and then double-click it or press Ctrl+Enter on the keyboard. AceText will hide itself, and insert the clip into the document you are editing with the other application.
If you want to sequentially insert a large number of clips into a document, look up those clips in AceText and activate SequencePaste by clicking the SequencePaste Up or Down button in the toolbar. Then switch to the document you are editing, and press the AcePaste hotkey to paste the clips in the sequence one after the other. This way you do not have to switch back and forth between your application and AceText.
SequencePaste is particularly useful when you need to move several pieces of text from one application to another. First, copy all the items one by one in the first application. AceText will capture them automatically. Then select the items on the ClipHistory Tab and turn on SequencePaste. Now, you can paste all the items one by one in the target application. This saves you having to switch back and forth between both applications, and reorienting yourself each time.
To grab somebody’s contact details off a web page and store them into your address book, first select and copy the person’s name, address, phone number, etc. on the web page, one by one. Then turn on SequencePaste selecting those items. Now, switch to your contact management software, create a new contact, and paste the items one by one pressing Win+Alt+V.