I am looking at purchasing a line expansion program, but do not want to spend several hundred dollars to do so if there are good ones for less than this. I will be working in WP 5.1 and wonder if anyone out there has tried Abbreviate?
I love the quickword selection in WP8 and believe
this program might be similar. I know a lot of you MT's use Smartype and some have mentioned IT for Instant test - do you know how much these cost? Your replies are very appreciated.

Hi,

This page lists several expanders, tells a bit about what they do, what platforms they work with, and the costs. There are links to the web pages where they are sold so you can get more information.

http://home.earthlink.net/~agjon/list.htm

I use Shorthand (without the MedBrain part), and find that it works just fine for me. I needed something with a very small memory footprint, as the program I work in is a memory hog! It was also very easy to learn to use it. Otherwise I might have tried Instant Text, as it sounds just wonderful, and people who use it seem to love it -- it apparently has a somewhat longer learning curve, however.

I hope you find the list and web pages helpful.

Thank you very much. The link was really helpful.

I work in WP 5.1 and have FlashForward. I think Abbreviate is the new name for it. I think it is great for what I paid for it ($100). Don't use WP Expand--$30 and a rip-off! I've used PRD but it's like $400 and it's not 4 times better than Flashforward. Smartype is great, but it's like twice the price of Flashforward. If money were no object I would have gone with that, most likely.

The only problem I have with Flashforward (and it might have been corrected in Abbreviate) is that it doesn't acknowledge hard returns (i.e., if I have a doc's address it expands all the way out one line and doesn't break with the hard returns) and you have to look things up by the expanded part and not the abbreviation. With PRD you could do either.

Hope that helps!

Thank you for the info, I am looking more and more at Abbreviate. One site had it advertised for $49.00. Have a great day!