Indispensable, Can't live without it!...True click to type

Pros: Decided to buy it after only 10 min of evaluation. I did exhaustive testing of many other apps for over a month to find something to help ease my work load doing medical transcription for a multi-physician practice. Though some of the other auto text apps were good, most of them required me to mouse over the task tray & then browse a tree like structure to find my phrase, which took extra steps & just wasn?t convenient. TextBeast, however, can remain visible OR minimize into a small pane you can position anywhere on the desktop. I use this program on a 15.4? notebook & even on an average sized screen, the maximized window fits in the ?white space? of a Word doc (using print view in Word). This means I can see all phrases w/o giving up any screen space & w/o obstructing other apps.

Each library (# available depends on version) has 9 pgs you switch to by clicking the corresponding page button & each of those pgs has 20 text boxes (10 ?full text? & 10 ?label?, but in actuality all 20 of them are useable as full phrase boxes). This means I can quickly CLICK TO TYPE & get through my doc. As fast as I can click insert the text is in my Word doc. If I see a phrase I haven?t yet added, I can highlight it & drag to an empty box so it copies the phrase into textBeast for future use.

I have used this app in both XP Pro & Vista Premium. I use this app mostly with MS Word (tested with Office XP & 2007) & speech recognition (to get the doctor phrases I can?t predict & therefore can?t program into textBeast) as well as Start/Stop, a transcription app. Additionally, I have multiple other apps open & this app experiences NO lag.

The support team is extremely responsive and fast, which is refreshing. They listen to customer response & implement suggestions into the app. I am a longtime user, having at this point gone through a few versions (it is updated regularly). I can?t wait to see what feature gets added next.

Cons: The only ?con? I have is to say that though you can change colors to ?skin? the application, I wish it were more aesthetically pleasing in that it does not currently mirror the Vista glass experience. However, as this team is so responsive to customer suggestions, perhaps we will see that in a later release!

Posted: 17-Apr-2008 04:29:54 PM

Potential, but still needs major work

Pros: This program has a cute interface and allows you to include pics of your contacts under their entry. It does have potential and I will leave it under my Watch List so that I can reevaluate if changes are made. However....

Cons: I noticed right away that the program doesn't even include a field to enter zip or postal code. If this is implemented I would like to see it as a field for zip and/or postal code so that Canadian 6 character codes could be used. Also, it doesn't include an "address 2" field for things such as apt. or suite numbers. There may be other issues as well, but honestly I found this wouldn't remotely work for my needs because of the two major flaws I just mentioned and I had it installed less than 90 seconds because of that.

Posted: 16-Dec-2006 09:34:50 AM

Minor issues

Pros: This product does what it says it will do. The interface was nice, the speed of scan was good, it was easy.

Cons: However, after generating the report, when I tried to do anything with it the program would immediately crash. I did a reboot of my Windows XP PRO SP2 machine and reran this program. After waiting another 25 minutes for the scan to complete, the report was nicely generated and when I clicked to export the data the program crashed again. Too bad...I liked this program, but if it can't process any information it has no real world use for ME. I use Double Killer or DupKiller instead(also available on download.com for free).

Posted: 06-Jan-2007 11:22:52 AM