Thornsoft's Clipmate

Anyone who has been using computers for a while is pretty comfortable use the CUT <ctrl><c> and PASTE <ctrl><v> commands with their computer.

Life is made easier by highlighting some important information with the mouse, copying it and then pasting it in another location.

When ever this command is performed, the information is copied temporarily into a place in the computers memory (the clipboard) until something is else copied or the computer is shut down.

What Clipmate does is add many, many functions to the clipboard to help you save and reuse helpful information as you come across it. Here's how.

Getting Started With Clipmate

You can download a free 30 day trial of clipmate from here. This will give you 30 days to fully try out the program to decide if its useful or not to you.

One thing about clipmate that makes it so handy is that it is extremely simple to use. As a matter of fact it automatically works when you need it most. That is, anytime you copy something on your computer, clipmate saves a copy of it to be referenced later if you need it.

You can not only reference it later, you can organized your saved "clips" in different folders to stay organized. That is really just the beginning of this program's many features.

I use clipmate to:

• save interesting articles that I want to refer back to
• save and organize web addresses for projects I am working on
• capture screen shots to save for project
• cleanup saved text to remove html formatting, email ">>>" code etc
• easily copy and "power paste" customer information into other programs (more on that in a moment)

Here is what the clipmate screen looks like when its running:

Not Just Storage

Clipmate doesn't just store the copied items for you. There is a wide range of things you can do with them. Clipmate has many built in functions such as:

• spell check
• thesaurus
• clean up html code
• clean up emails by removing >>> symbols
• convert upper/lower case letters
• highlight searched for terms

Power Pasting

There is one function of clipmate that I use quite a bit. It is called "Power Pasting".

If you have ever had to copy the customer information from an order form into another program, you will really appreciate this. For example you may want to copy and paste the following information when someone orders from you:

• first name
• last name
• street address
• City or town
• phone number
• email address

Clipmate makes this extremely easy.

1. You simply quickly copy each field, which is automatically saved into clipmate in the order that they were copied.
2. You then switch over the program you want to paste them.
3. Clipmate then lets you "Power Paste" the clipped items, one by one in the order that you had copied them. Click on the name field and press <ctrl><v> and the first name appears. Click in the last name field and press <ctrl><v> again and now the last name appears. Clipmate automatically moves onto to the next clipped item as you go. It couldn't be easier!

You can see the powerpaste button here:

Very Well Thought Out

Because Clipmate has been around so long, its many features are very well thought out. They get a lot of suggestions from their users and try to incorporate as many useful things as possible.

For example, when you save something from a web page it gives you a variety of information about the clipped info. For example, it automatically logs exactly what page it came from, the date/time and even what type of clip it is (text, graphic), the size of the clip etc.

In addition you can easily print out or export the clips to a variety of formats.

The more you use it, the more you appreciate the thought that went into many of its functions.

Online Videos Available

Thornsoft provides some online tutorials here to give you a better idea of all of the possibilities of this program.

There are other "clipboard" type programs out there and I have tried several of them. I really feel clipmate is the best of the best. I have used this program for four or five years now. It is tremendously useful.

I recommend giving it a try with their free 30 day download available from here. This is one program I would not be without.

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