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My trick for stopping expansions from expanding....SM

Posted By: Gatrans on 2006-06-11
In Reply to: Thank you both - these are exactly the things (sm) - barbv

This might not work for you but I find it quicker to add it in my shortcuts. I simply add the last letter on it again when I don't want it to expand. For example, BP = blood pressure but BPP = blood pressure. COPD = chronic.... but COPDD = COPD. That's a lot faster for me than to do all those other steps. Just thought I would throw that out there in case it might work for someone else too.


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DH either comes to me or I go to him if I'm at a stopping point. We always hug
and kiss.  We are also on different schedules and he goes to bed early and I work late and he fixes me a chai latte every night and kisses me before heading off to bed.   If I'm still up when he gets up I get a hug and a kiss before he leaves. 
My SIL used this and had no problem stopping.
She couldn't stand taste after starting this and now she can't even stand the smell. It's probably been 4 years since she did this.
there's no stopping outsourcing now
what many people don't understand is this is just the beginning. We and our children will be competing against the best in the field from ANY country- Ireland, China, India...so one better find a job that has to be done HERE - which could be anything from window-washing to nursing...or be prepared to be very good at what you do...
But what is the pay? maybe that is what is stopping MTs from taking the jobs
Most jobs out there only want to pay 8 cpl if that much.

No one wants to work for peanuts.

There may be a few out there worth taking, but they dont last long.
Fast forward, very little stopping, no
calls. I have done this hospital so long that very easy for me, know the dictators, these are the 4s also. I do some straight (training hospital). My favs are ops also and it is just fast, fast typing and fast forward on the VR. I did not want to work fulltime anymore so set this 3000 per line on the days I work so I can still bring home what I want to make.
Then stopping trying to negate her feelings
Bully for you that you wouldn't feel slighted. How wonderful that you don't mind the benign neglect of your husband regarding your anniversary. At least, one would assume, that your husband does something that contributes to making your life pleasant, happy, and easier on a regular basis or does something that nurtures your soul in a romantic or loving way. However, other than signing my paycheck, while at the same time finding ways to get more work and more hours for less pay, my company does very little to foster the warm fuzzy feeling necessary to be able to overlook a cheap slight. As someone pointed out earlier, a 1 penny tip to a waitress is designed as an insult. I've gotten coupons worth more than $5 out of the Sunday paper, and I didn't have to risk carpal tunnel or sacrifice family time to get it.
Just stopping by to wish all a Happy Turkey Day coming up....nm
x
Expanding on the expanders
I also create Expanders for two words in a sequence that I mess up all the time. For example, I often type onteh instead of on the, so I have an Expander for that. I make a lot of these double mistakes where it is a misspelling plus a missed spacebar. I also misspell some of my expanders sometimes so I have made expanders for my misspelled expanders! For example, I have TOLW and TOWL for tolerated the procedure well.
Expanding if you are not supposed to
can be called on an audit and I have seen people fired for what they call "line padding" by doing such things.
I wasn't talking about stopping work today. Before we do
how many of us there are. We need to be locating and contacting MTs who don't use MT Stars or other MT boards, and start networking with them. Five or six of us from this board deciding to stop work today isn't going to change anything. We have to get our numbers up, and get all of our collective antennae pointed in the same direction.
Advice on expanding my skills..

If I  want to specialize in Orthopedic or Cardiology or some other specialty, what is the best way to do this?  I currently only do ER.


Would I  have to enroll in an on-line school or can I just use practice tapes? 


Any advice is appreciated!!


spelling numbers out is expanding for more $$$..nm
x
Yeah, they might be expanding and getting new accounts ! - sm
look on the bright side. Anyway its not best to jump ship from one job until you know you will be happy at another....which is why I always work 2....cover your butt.
Ctrl + Alt + A also stops expanding.
nm
shorthand expanding too slowly
Just wondering if anyone can tell me how to get my ShortHand to expand the text faster?  I know there is a settng under preferences, and I have tried several variations, but still not expanding any faster.  Thanks in advance.
...funny! (expanding my post above, got cut off)
x
Re: expanding with punctuation, more info inside
I have been working on this platform for over a year and absolutely LOVE it. It is not the same as autocorrect expansions. This platform offers a LOT more.

I will type this directly from my manual to explain how the ESP abbreviations are expanded:

Press or type a delinter (a spacebar, enter, period, colon, semicolon, comma, question mark or exclamation point) that is appropriate to the sentence text or punctuation. The exapansion appears AS SOON AS you type the delimiter.

You can highlight entire sentences, paragraphs, etc and enter them directly into the ESP list and make a short abbrev. to retrieve them.

To add an ESP, press control, control and type it directly in, or highlight text in your document and then press control control and name your short abbreviation for it.

Sometimes, depending if your sentences are really LONG you will have to copy/paste directly into ESP and then give it a short.

In addition, with ESPs you can format words to be BOLD by inserting a tag. You can also put a tag in for something underlined, italic, etc. They also allow you to insert pauses and backups in your ESP so that you can type yof and get the hyphen first -year-old female.

Pauses are really neat when you want to nest an ESP inside another one. For example: if you put the following entries in your ESP:

lt (left)
tphp (The patient had pain in the)

(The ESPs need to first be created and exist)

Now you type the abbreviation containing the pause then press spacebar. The sentence expands to the point of pause and then type the abbreviation you want to nest, press the spacebar and hit enter. The complete next appears in your document. Believe me, this is something Autocorrect cannot do and really comes in handy especially when you have really repitious dictators who always give the same order on vital signs, etc.

You can also run a microsoft word macro as part of an expansion if you want. There is a special dialog box that the ESP uses for this.

ESPs also allow suffixes to be added to root words (another feature) but this is something I haven't used much yet.


You can also create more than one list of ESPs (can have 2 open at a time).

This platform also allows you to make "normals" for really long documents. Say you have a 2 page op report that a doctor will use over and over. You can just bring the entire document in. You can edit these normals at any time. These are like templates that you can insert jump codes, all your headings, numbering formats, etc.

On this board, I've been reading a lot about how people run to buy either Instant Text or ShortHand (as these are compatible with Dictatphone) but this is not something you have to run out and purchase. The ESPs offer a lot more than autocorrect.

So far, my one list of ESPs has over 20,000 entries and my line counts daily for 8 hours average between 1500 and 1800. Not bad.

The platform is REALLY easy to work from as another poster said you can pull up previous dictation from another Transcriptionist and copy/paste directly into the document you are typing. This is a really great feature when you have those really lousy dictators who pretty much say the same physical exam, etc. You can then just follow along and edit as you go.

It really is easy to use, and personally I love the Expander and have no complaints. Good luck.




I learned this many years ago: I type in phrases ,even when I'm not expanding but SM
I use Expanders VERY extensively. Doesn't ever have to be a canned report. Everybody says "the patient" and everybody says "within normal limits" for two examples that I'm sure you already are using. No telling how many thousands of abbreviations I have.
Alt + Shift will toggle the esp off for a quick pause in expanding...
Using the example given were pt expands to prothrombin time but you want to keep it as PT, you would type PT and then hit the Alt + Shift key combination, continue typing, no need to hit the key combo after PT because it's a "one-stop" fix.  Hope this helps :-)
Are you referring to expanding text or real macros?
Can't tell you what you are doing wrong if you don't tell us what you are doing.
There is a trick

I did a concrete patio painted a couple of years back.  We etched it first, which I think is supposed to be an important part of keeping the paint from peeling.  After applying the concrete paint (which was bought at Lowe's), we waited the required time and put a sealer on it.  So far, no problems.  


Just an idea you might like -- we took all different shapes of leaves and did some concrete paint on them in a contrasting color and pressed them down around the edges to "pretty" it up a bit.  We get tons of compliments!


a little trick
The > points right - more right-handers. The < points left - less left-handers.
what's the trick?

Could you please share with us or e-mail me what the trick is??? I'm having the same problem and it's driving me nuts!!!


Thanks!!!


Is this a trick everyone knows but me?
Maybe it's got to do with the way my pools were set up at past places, but I never got to see the entire body of work to pick what I wanted. At my current place, I get 2 jobs at a time that are automatically routed to me, I assume by computer. Once again, I have no look at what is out there. Theoretically, I guess I could return a job to the pool and take the chance that I'll get something better, but there is also the chance that I'll get something worse and that my repeated rejection of jobs while come to the attention of someone, bring their wrath down on me. I can spot sneaky a mile away, but I apparently never mastered the art of executing it.
Trick or treat
Since we have a Doberman, I doubt it will be a problem.
good trick

Thanks for the tip!!  This is off the subject but I have seen other posts like from Mimi that end with "nm", what does that mean?  Thanks


This is a neat trick, if you don't already use it...sm
I'm sure many of you have heard of this already, but for those who haven't...it sure helps me when I'm typing AND reading back over my work.  You can hold down the control key and turn the roller wheel up a notch on your mouse to enlarge the print on your screen.  Then just hit control and scroll it back down to make it smaller again.  This has made it "easy on the eyes" for me.  Hope someone can benefit from this as I have!
The trick for cc: in AutoCorrect is to use a ; or /
in front of cc in the replace box so Word will back up and change the cap to lowercase. It's a lot faster than AutoText.

;c expands to cc:

Can someone help with an internet trick...

If I was looking on the internet at something and saw an address to respond to, I could click on the email address and it would pop open a box in my yahoo and put the address right in the "compose" a message part of my yahoo mail.


A couple of days ago, this feature stopped working, and now I am cutting and pasting the email addresses off of the internet and pasting them into my yahoo mail. 


Does anyone know how to get this feature back.



Thanks!


 


Hardly get to use my expansions any more
Most of the doctors whose jobs I used to not lift my foot for the pedal for from start to finish, are now on ASR and I cannot say that about them anymore. Those definitely take longer because not only do you have to change, delete and add here and there, you have to scrutinize every letter or mistakes the listening device may have made. Obvious what is saved to expansion was checked to perfection already.
Unless, of course, the MTs use only expansions

expansions
Put in a lot of the common things most physicians say for every report like:  the patient, increased pain, complains of, tells me that, MRI results, x-ray of the, come back in, return to see me in, was seen in the emergency room, I told her to, I told him to, see me back as needed == things like that.  If you analyze a report, you'll see that most of it is plain English and those things are said over and over.  Once I switched from concentrating the majority of my entries from medical words to plain English, my speed really picked up.  I still add in the medical things, of course, but with my glossary I can work on many accounts with a lot more ease and productivity.  It's taken quite a time but well worth it.   
expansions
I don't worry about whether I already tried an expansion, because if it's there and I don't hit it right away, it isn't easy enough, so I try again. Usually I stick to a few standard forms, but that can vary from first letters of a phrase plus x on the end to e on then end, to some 2-word phrases that I use the first 3 letters of each word together. I might delete one that is rarely used if I want to reuse the abbreviation for a more useful phrase. I've deleted a lot of the first ones I tried, because they really weren't very helpful. I like to keep the phrases short, rather than try for long ones, maybe 3-5 words, because doctors tend not to be entirely consistent in how they say things, and I have verbatim accounts...less need to reword things that way.

I think that about 40% of what I type is an expansion of some sort on my normal doctors. If I'm doing someone new or someone who isn't consistent in what they say it may be quite a lot less, but that isn't really counting the individual word expansions, just the phrases. Many of the words over 3-4 letters I get with 1, 2, or 3 Keystrokes at most. You just have to keep your eyes on the expander, and sometimes even slow down enough to see words not at the top of the list. I use Smartype, so they come up in order of most used, which I can change at any point if needed.
Get a Hiney Buster! That will do the trick! nm
x
That probably would do the trick. After I hit "post message," sm
that thought struck me. I'll try it. Thanks!
Turning the control off did the trick. sm

I don't even need the convertor now.  The plug-in downloaded and my GP plays the dvf files just fine.  Wow!!!  I can't thank you enough. 


Thanks, thanks, thanks!!!!


Hey, cool trick for log keeping. Can you tell us how you do it? :) nm
s
another trick of the trade for soundalikes
that's a good idea; but to avoid extra Keystrokes and loss of productivity by deleting the glossary def entry you could also make *mental associations* for soundalikes, e.g. dysphaGia pertains to the Gut vs. dysphaSia pertains to Speech; ILlicit is ILlegal vs. Elicit Evokes; ilEum pertains to Eating vs. ilIum pertains to sItting... well, you get the idea! =)
An accent trick that helps me...
After spending way too long trying to figure out an allergy one night that was pronounced as s/l fee-oh-REE-nul and which turned out to be Fiorinal, I started double-checking and realized that East Asian (India, Pakistan, etc.) and Arabic language dictators will often incorrectly accent the 3rd syllable if the word happens to naturally be accented on the 2nd syllable.

So when I have a problem with a word that's accented on the 3rd syllable, I'll re-emphasize it in my head, changing to hitting it hard on the 2nd, and that will often help. Or just playing around with emphasizing different syllables from how they're doing it. Now if I could only find a way to mentally blank out the 'trilling' (arrgh).
My expansions on MQ's server
Conditions at my local MQ ofc have deteriorated to the point where I am ready to throw in the towel and look elsewhere.  My question:  I am using my own computer.  Is it possible to retrieve/print out my Expanders and shortcuts that I made up myself before I leave.  I've only worked for MQ, and imagine I've accumulated over 2000 of these shortcuts.   I know they are on my hard drive, but I have no program that will enable me to access them.  Does anyone know of any such animal?  Secondarily, has anyone ever left one MQ ofc for another, or just plain asked to be switched to other accounts.  TIA
According to their web site they pay for expansions (sm)
I personally think we aren't paid for blanks and headers and that makes a difference. I have been working on DQS for a couple of weeks now and have gotten up to a whopping 200 plus per hour so I feel like I am making headway.
I have a question about DQS expansions.

I have 6000 phrases in my PRD which I am about to transfer to the DQS expansion program (I won't start for a couple of weeks).  The tech says anything more than a few hundred might cause expansions to be sluggish while I'm transcribing :(.  Has anyone been having this problem?


Also, is it better to use my own Window-based glossary program instead of the one DQS provides?  The tech says he can't advise me on that and the techs won't provide assistance on it. 


 


Watch those expansions for BM
She had a large, foul-smelling black male overnight with massive bleeding.
Need HELP to transfer expansions

I want to transfer my shortcuts (expansions) from DocQScribe to Microsoft office word.  Is it possible to do this?  Can anyone tell me where to go for instructions/guidelines on doing this?  Please help!


drug expansions
How you set up your expansions for drugs?
I use the first three letters and the last letter. For example, for Plavix, I would set it up as plax. Also, for drugs that I type frequently, I sometimes shorten it more - Lasix is lx.
I want to add dosages also, but I'm undecided how I want to do it. I would love to hear how others do it. Thanks in advance for sharing your ideas and suggestions.
Did they ever say they wouldn't pay for expansions? More likely,
s
Adding Expansions

I was wondering how you build your expansion list, meaning, about how many words do you put in day?  A few, 20, 50?  And do you review them daily so you know what you have?  I tend to create them and then forget I have them and then do not use them.  What are you tips?  Thanks in advance!


IMO, it will. I, too, used the same expansions for many years...sm
and found IT to be a pain in the tush. I did, however, find ShortHand or ShortCut to be much better choices. Not sure if they are still around as I use ESP and AutoCorrect (you can use both if you allow it in the preferences). I learned the expansions one way and found too many choices to be a hindrance. Good luck with your search!
How many expansions have you put into your autocorrect over...sm
the last 14 years. I started with a blank autocorrect 10 years ago and now have many thousand expansions from individual words, to phrases, paragraphs, and even full reports. I still add new ones almost every day. The way I have it set up I save more than 50% of my keystrokes.
Chris is a boring one-trick pony. (nt)

Daisy Dukes and a plunging top ought to do the trick!
/