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Extend your Clipboard with Smartboard XP. Review by Kai Chandler
| Product | SmartBoard XP |
|---|---|
| Company | Oakley Data Services |
| Web | www.smartboardxp.com |
| Price | £15 |
| We like | The entire product - it's a real timesaver |
| We don't like | Hmm. Still looking... |
| Rating | 10/10 |
| Requirements |
You are probably familiar with the idea of the Clipboard - it's at the heart of Cut, Copy and Paste. If this is unknown territory for you then you should read our Computing Guide.
A big limitation of the Windows Clipboard is that when you cut or copy an item, it overwrites whatever was there before, so there's no history available. Wouldn't it be great if you could recall something that you'd copied a few minutes or even a few days back?
That's where the concept of a Clipboard extender comes in. It stores items that you cut or copy so you can retrieve them later. It does this by watching the Clipboard and automatically taking copies of any data that you have configured it to collect. It's a fantastic timesaver - once you've used one, you'll never want to be without it.
One of the best Clipboard extenders is Smartboard. It's been through several revisions, and we review Smartboard XP which is designed to run on Windows 95,98, ME, NT4, 2000 or XP or later.
Basic functions
Once installed, every item you cut or copy is stored. Of course you can't keep them for ever, or you'll eventually run out of disk space. The default is for 26 items but you can increase the number as you wish. In addition, there are tabs for bitmaps, metafiles and other formats.
To see the list of items to paste back out, you press the control and page up keys together (Ctrl-PageUp.) Smartboard XP is highly configurable and you can change this to another combination if you wish. Whatever the combination, it opens a Smartboard window with a list of the 26 most recently stored items.
To paste an item back into a Windows application, just doubleclick it. Alternatively, each item has a letter identifying it - you can press a letter to select an item and automatically paste it in. Since the list is stored on disk, the items are retained even if you turn the PC off and then back. This is a real benefit over the original Windows Clipboard which loses its contents when the PC is off.
Plus a lot more
As well as the basic paste function described above, Smartboard XP allows you to define your own categories and move items to those categories. The benefit is that categorised items remain until deleted so they are ideal for standard text, such as your name and address or text for standard letters. You could create a category for standard letters with a number of entries and pull the entries in as required. You can also edit any of the text items using Smartboard's editor.
Hotkeys
Each item can be given a nickname and hotkey for example Control - Shift - A to paste your "Mr. Angry" letter into your favourite word processor. You can set up a range of different hotkeys to bring up all sorts of standard text.
Rules
A very powerful feature of Smartboard 2000 is the ability to define rules eg. if the copied item contains the word "client" then copy to the client category. There's a lot more to it than we can deal with here in this article.
Scripts
There are several VBScript files on the website. One adds a column of numbers copied to Smartboard - perhaps you could add your own?
Other features include templates and Text To Speech although the latter requires Windows XP or later.
To sum up
Smartboard XP is an almost essential application to give you the functionality that should have been part of Windows. Try it - if you like it you can register for a mere £15.
