Reviews

Review: ActiveWords

• By Mike Gunderloy
• October 27, 2004

ActiveWords Plus 1.9
$49.95
ActiveWord Systems, Inc.
Winter Park, Florida
www.activewords.com

It's pretty easy to describe what ActiveWords does: it monitors everything you type in Windows, and if it sees a certain series of keystrokes, it intercepts them and does something. For example, if I type "fb2k" and hit the F8 key, ActiveWords opens the FooBar 2000 music player on my system. It doesn't matter whether I'm in a Word document, a text editor, or just looking at the Windows desktop at the time.

OK, pretty simple idea, but these guys have built it out into a well-rounded program with lots of features. One of the keys is that it's really, really easy to create new ActiveWords. There's a little wizard that walks you through the most common things you'd like to do:

• Substitute text (ideal for form mail or fixing typos)
• Launch a program
• Open a document
• Navigate to a Web site
• Send e-mail
• Open a folder
• Manipulate a Windows setting

But beyond that, there's a full scripting langauge lurking here. For example, to open a browser on our internal SharePoint server, and have it automatically dismiss the credentials prompt, I wrote a tiny ActiveWords script:

<"http://SEESAW">
<WAIT FOR WINDOW:TITLE=Prompt>
<ENTER>

The scripting language can do all sorts of things: type characters and special keys, manipulate the shift keys, call functions from DLLs, chaing multiple ActiveWords together, prompt for user input, find special folders, and so on. To get a sense of what it can do, ActiveWords provides a number of "applications", which are groups of ActiveWords put together into libraries. One, for example, automates a whole batch of common Microsoft Outlook tasks, while another has shortcuts for C++ programming. (In that respect, ActiveWords resembles many other text template expansion products - except that it works everywhere).

ActiveWords comes in several editions; the Plus Edition that I looked at is the middle of the road one. There's also a slightly stripped ActiveWords SE and an ActiveWords Enterprise that lets you share ActiveWord lists across users. You can download a trial version from the company's site and use all of its features while you decide whether ActiveWords fits in with your own way of working.