Faster Snippets: Best Practices

Modified on Mon, 15 May, 2023 at 5:24 PM

Faster Snippets is a very powerful feature in Faster Suite. It can be used to automatically generate text in any application, pull information from Clio, and register keyboard commands.

This article is designed to help you make effective use of Faster Snippets without interfering with your other processes and applications.


Tip #1 - Use numbers or special characters in your abbreviations

One thing users will notice is that their Clio text snippets are now available in all applications.  This is generally useful but can cause problems if there are snippets set up in Clio that match other things that you might be typing.

For example, you may have a snippet in Clio that expands "bc" into "because". If you are filling out an address in an email or form and enter "BC" for "British Columbia", Faster Snippets will find your Clio snippet and expand "BC" into "because". This behavior is unwanted and can actually interfere with what you're doing.

Instead of using simple abbreviations like "bc", Faster Law recommends using numbers or special characters to specifically identify snippets as snippets.  In this example, the user could use "/bc" or "bc1" in place of "because".  This way, typing "bc" normally won't activate the snippet.


Tip #2 - Count your keystrokes

When using Faster Snippets to create emails or fill out forms, you'll need to configure the snippet to use the Tab key.  If you are unsure of how many times to hit Tab to get to the next field, you can always just go to the email or form you're trying to fill out and hit Tab manually to count how many times it takes.  Faster Snippets is just hitting that key for you, so whatever you have to do on your keyboard to do something, that's what you should tell Faster Snippets to do.


Tip #3 - Wait!

Faster Snippets is fast, sometimes too fast. If you configure a snippet to fill a form and you're not getting the behavior you expected, it may be because the application can't keep up with how quickly Faster Snippets is filling in the information. This would be indicated by fields in a form having incomplete information, multiple fields being skipped over, or not going to the next field before entering more information even though there is a Tab command in the snippet.

When building snippets, you can use the Wait command to manually tell Faster Snippets to wait a certain length of time before moving to the next action.  The Wait command is measured in milliseconds, so enter 1000 for 1 second, or 100 for 0.1 seconds.  Usually, 100 or 200 milliseconds is a long enough pause for the application to catch up.

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