Entries Tagged 'Tips & Tricks' ↓

There are a mulititude of different ways you can open documents and files with Dragon, however, I will focus on constantly referred to documents in this blog post. Many of us, especially in the legal field, have reference documents that need to be opened throughout the day or on a regular basis.

Most people place these files on their desktop, minimize their windows and double click the file to open it when requiring information within. While this may seem fairly straightforward, the process often leads to a cluttered desktop or orphaned files that are no longer required.  Moreover, the aforementioned method is not as rapid as speaking a couple of words to open the same document.

The solution?

Create a Step-by-Step command in Dragon that will open this constantly referred to document with a quick voice command that you can issue any time, and from anywhere. In other words, if you are writing an email that requires you to quote or reference information from within a file on your server, simply issue the command you’ve assigned to open the document even while writing your email. Once the information has been located, complete the email, close the file and carry on.

Remember, a little time invested in creating custom commands will save you even more time in the long-run.

For assistance with command creation or streamlining your office operations, contact Alexandria of Speakeasy Solutions at 604-264-9109 ext. 102.

There are some cumbersome and ridiculously named commands within Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Dragon Medical. I think “clear variable delimiters” is at the top of my list. Quickly approaching this one, with respect to Dragon version 11, is “list programs”.

If you have Dragon Professional, Medical or Legal, you can easily create a new command that will launch one of these poorly named commands. Name the command as you wish. “clear brackets” and “list apps” are both much easier to say.  In the case of the latter I’ve just included a command in our SeS Voice Commands package with a list allowing for a number of variants of the words “application” and “program”.

Do take care, however, that you do not name the command such that it will be inadvertently triggered should you routinely voice something similar.

If you would like more information about Dragon command creation and their benefits, please contact us as we have a Dragon training session specifically designed to not only teach you how to create time-saving commands within Dragon, but we will create a series of useful commands that will serve as templates for your own command creation in the future.

My clients never cease hearing my endless refrain of “the right tool for the right job” for I am fanatic about efficiency. Is Dragon faster, or is the scroll wheel on the mouse faster? These are questions that plague me constantly. The answer always is: “that depends”.

However, when working in Microsoft Outlook, and I find myself buried deep down in my inbox, I find it much faster to say “go to top” to reposition the cursor focus to the very top of my inbox in order to view the latest email.  Conversely, if I am at the top of my email, and realize I need to reply to something that is at the bottom of the list, I say “go to bottom” to reposition the cursor focus.

Bottom line: if I have to scroll more than twice with my scroll wheel, I have already wasted time where Dragon can perform the task infinitely faster.

Blackberry audio files are stored in a proprietary .AMR format.

The dream of every doctor and lawyer is that they can simply grab their Blackberry, dictate their notes, dock their device and those notes become transcribed. This is an excellent dream, but can the dream be given form?  Realistically?

Yes… with the following understanding and caveats.

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Internet Explorer (IE) and Dragon do not always play nicely together; particularly the latest version of IE.

Intermittent issues are the most difficult to track down, however, knowing that an issue exists is half the battle, and removes the need for you to wonder: “What did I do wrong?”. It’s not you… it’s IE and Dragon.

Even if an issue is determined, the next step is finding a resolution.  If there is no resolution, then a workaround must be conceived and used.  Such is the case with IE and Dragon.

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