It’s basically used to compile and execute mouse and keyboard macros (you write the scripts using a text editor such as Notepad). Macros are series of instructions that are used to control actions on your computer, such as opening software and sending key strokes.

It compiles and executes these simple scripts to control other programmes, such as IE, Office, image editors, and many more. Commands mimic keyboard, mouse and joystick input (which covers almost all you could desire).

It's similar in concept to Applescript (for Macs) and is based on AutoIt (for PCs), but from what I can tell, it’s more powerful and has a greater range of functions. (Though note that it only runs on the Win platform.)

It uses high-level programming language and takes little effort to master if you know some basic computer languages like C++. Within days of first reading about it, I was able to automate a whole variety of tasks- making data backups, creating Excel spreadsheets, running Matlab programmes, cropping images, writing variables to text documents, opening files containing spike data, to name a few.

http://www.autohotkey.com/
There's a large community of users and extensive online support.

The great thing is that if you don’t know how to write software (like me), but have access to software that can collectively perform all or some of the functions you require, you can pool their individual capabilities together and pass values (numbers, strings) between them easily.

A script could consist of instructions such as:

1. Run Firefox
2. Access the Gmail website
3. Enter my username and password
4. Press the enter key

The software package includes a little programme that tells you the x- and y-coordinates of your mouse cursor onscreen, so that you can simulate clicks in a specific location, once you know where a button or some clickable item is positioned.

I’ve been recommending it to anybody who cares to listen! It's great for reducing repetitive strain injury- in the past I'd have to 'crack' my wrists after a session of mind-numbing repetitivity- was so bad for me and I always hated it!

You just have to write your scripts sensibly and include little safety checks to prevent inadvertent mistakes and looping errors (due to badly-timed key presses, for example).

1. Take a representative sample of your writing, paste all the text into a cell in Excel.
2. Place each word in a separate cell (Data>Text to Columns).
3. Transpose the row of words into a column by selecting the row of data, cutting the data and pasting it using ‘Paste Special’ with the ‘Transpose’ option ticked.
4. Use the formula IFCOUNT, to count the word frequency: supposing that your data is in column A, enter ‘=IFCOUNT(A:A,A1)’ without the quotation marks into the cell B1. Select cell B1, drag its bottom right corner across the rest of the cells in column B, to copy the formula across rows in column B.
5. Select all the data in columns A and B, and sort it primarily by the values in column B, in descending order, and secondarily by the values in column A.
6. Pick out the top 20 to 30 frequently used words that are long enough (say, at least 4 letters long) to merit a 2-symbol substitution.
7. For each of these words, decide on a short form version which, when entered into a Word document, you would like to have automatically replaced by the frequently used word.
8. In Word, open the Tools>AutoCorrect options box to manually add the list of short forms and the text which will replace them, in the section ‘Replace text as you type’.

For example, here are some of my commonly typed words and their corresponding 2-symbol short forms:

Word and short form
that ,t
from ,f
people ,p
these ,q
this ,x
with ,w
about ,a
mind ,d
their ,g
they ,z
when ,n
though ,v
many ,m
other ,o
some ,s
think ,k
being ,b
body ,y
into ,i
such ,u

I chose the comma symbol as it’s relatively accessible to my thumb, making it easy to type out the short form text.

The following sentence, for example, can be generated by typing out a much shorter version:

many people agree that their behaviour stems from their beliefs. some think that their mind exists independently of their body, while other people think that their mind, behaviour and beliefs come into being when emergent phenomena occur within the body.

,m ,p agree ,t ,g behaviour stems ,f ,g ,beliefs. ,s ,k ,t ,g ,d exists independently of ,g ,y, ,l ,o ,p ,k ,t ,g ,d, behaviour and beliefs ,c ,i ,b ,n emergent phenomena occur within the ,y.

Disadvantage:
-Although my AutoCorrect settings still instruct Word to automatically capitalise the first words of each sentence, it doesn’t seem to do this for the new entries. One way to get around this is by highlighting all the text in one’s document after it’s fully typed out, and setting the case to ‘Sentence case.’ This only presents a problem if one dislikes seeing uncapitalised words in the document while it’s being written.

This is a mockup of how a keyboard annotated with one's frequently used words would look (just for ease of reference, while one gets used to the system):

It’d be great if we had a plugin such that, when a particular keyboard key is pressed simultaneously with a letter or symbol, extremely common but short words such as ‘the,’ ‘and,’ ‘are,’ ‘for,’ and ‘our,’ are printed. The current system only yields valuable savings in time when words that are significantly longer than 2 letters are inserted.

When typing in Chinese, as one keys in the letters for each word, special software presents a list of candidate words from a built-in dictionary, and updates the list in real time. You choose the desired word by clicking on it or, more efficiently, by typing in the corresponding number on the list.

In Mandarin, words are symbolic and not alphabetic. When using a standard alphabetic keyboard to create Chinese symbols, one has to rely on a phonetic transliteration of each word (a system known as Hanyu Pinyin). Chinese words are essentially just one syllable long (though depending on one's regional accent, words might be more or less 'drawn out'). Each word has not only a particular transliterated spelling, but also a particular intonation with which it is pronounced. For a given spoken dialect, there's usually a range of 4 to 6 possible intonations, when one compiles intonations across all the words. Note that each word is assigned just one of the 4 or 6 possible intonations, it's not as if each word has all 4 or 6.

In addition to typing out the spelling, you key in a number to specify the intonation. Unsurprisingly, multiple words share the same phonetic transliteration, so once you've specified the transliterated spelling and the intonation, you've narrowed down the possibilities, but still have to select the correct word from a number of candidates (the number varies- it could go into the dozens, for words with 'popular' pronunciations). The software presents a list of matching words. To select the correct written word, you enter the corresponding number.

It might sound a little complicated and inconvenient but Chinese is a pretty complicated langauge and qwerty keyboards obviously weren't designed for it at all (they were barely designed for English!!), and it's really not hard if you are familiar with the language and are used to typing in this way. Text prediction has been around for ages for Chinese word processing, and is really necessary.

Previously, the best software I'd heard of for English text prediction on PCs, through cursory searches online, was WordLogic, which is optimised for people who have difficulty with a normal keyboard entry system. It logs key strokes and runs in the background while you use your normal word processor, so it takes time to switch between programmes while typing. It's really great if you need to enter in long sequences of pre-stored text, or can only press a small number of keys or take a while to press keys, but it wouldn't benefit ordinary users much.

I'm not sure how much the lists of predicted words changes over time, but I'd imagine that it stays stable enough for a frequent user to memorise the position number of a word on a list. Having to keep my eyes onscreen and refer to the list means that my typing speed isn't greatly improved, but if the order and selection of words on the lists stayed fairly predictable (to the human typist), I think one could rack up decent savings, especially for text that uses chunks of common phrases.

There are no built-in ways to do so reliably- the closest thing that MS has to offer is the creation of a patchy record of Autosaved files (good luck with that).

In the age of version control and constant multiple backups, this is unacceptable. Fortunately, a third-party developer has met this gaping need with a plugin called AutoHistory.

Inspired by another tool, ‘Visual Local History for Visual Studio,’ Marco Wiedemeyer created AutoHistory for Word 2007, Word 2010 and NEW Excel 2010, which provides a local history for documents.

AutoHistory automatically creates a backup of your file each time you save it, complete with a history of each edit, so that ‘You can view and restore each version you've ever saved.’

I came across it in an introductory article by Martin Brinkmann.

To install AutoHistory, first ensure that Microsoft Visual Studio Tools is installed on your computer, then download and run the application from CodePlex (Microsoft’s free open source project hosting site).

MS Word stores the last few cursor locations, in addition to the current location, in bookmarks named Sel, PrevSel1, PrevSel2, respectively. MS Support provides online documentation of predefined bookmarks for Word. If you have several MS Word documents open, the memory buffer is shared across all of them (at least, that's how it is on my Windows 7 OS setup).

When you open a previously-edited document, you can also use this command to make your cursor jump straight to the location of your last edit (just before you closed the document), instead of wasting time, scrolling up and down.

For more useful MS Word keyboard shortcuts, Dave Rado has compiled a list with descriptions of some of the best.

Now all I need is a programme-independent tool, to let let me store cursor locations in any application and jump between them. That would improve efficiency and accuracy when editing code.