Faster Snippets: Other Text and Keyboard Actions

We’ve looked at some of the more common actions used in Faster Snippets, but now let’s learn about the other text and keyboard actions that we can use.

We can open our edit snippets window first.  We’ll go to Faster Suite on the Faster Ribbon, click the settings wheel, select Text Snippets on the left and Custom Libraries across the top, then click the pencil icon.

Now let’s create a new snippet, delete the existing action, and click the Add Another Action button.

Under Text Actions, we have a few things that we haven’t covered yet.  In addition to Type Text, we also have Copy Text, Paste Text, and Paste Rich Text.

Copy Text can be useful if you want to copy a specific sequence of text with Clio fields to your clipboard and then paste it into different places.

For example, we could put Matter Number and Matter Description into this action, then when we activate the snippet it would find the information in Clio and put it in our clipboard.  We could then navigate to as many different places as we want and paste the matter number and matter description for a matter without having to activate the snippet or select the matter multiple times.

Paste text is similar, but it will immediately paste the information as well.

Paste Rich Text has a slightly different purpose.

Using the Paste Rich Text action, we can automatically enter formatted text instead of just typing text using the selected formatting in the program we’re using.  We can type anything we want, then highlight the text, right-click and select Font, and then choose how the text should be formatted.

We can change the font, color, make it bold, underline it, or anything else we would normally do in a document editor.  When we click OK we’ll see the text change to show us how it will appear when we activate the snippet.

Now let’s look at the less common keyboard actions.  We have Hold Keys Down and Release Keys in the Keyboard Actions menu.

Hold Keys Down will hold any keys we specify until we use the Release Keys command.  This can be useful if we need to hold a specific key down while typing some text or pressing other keys in sequence.  We would just do a Hold Keys action, then the Type Text or Press Keys action, then a Release Keys action.  These actions are configured in the way as other keyboard actions, we can just type the name of a key and select it from the list.

These actions are less frequently used than Type Text, Press Keys, and Keyboard Shortcuts, but each has its own application in certain situations.