Transcription Tips & Tricks:
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Maximizing Keyboarding

One of the ways to ensure you are getting as much work done as possible is to make use of abbreviations. If you are serious about making medical transcription from home a small-business, you really have to learn to use abbreviations to speed up your work. Some word-processors have spelling features that allow you to use auto-correction when transcribing at your computer. You can use this feature to expand words "on the fly." For instance, instead of having to always type "examination," you can instruct the speller to expand an abbreviation like "exn" to the word "examination." You can also purchase software specifically designed to abbreviate and expand words and phrases. We sell such a program in The Medword eStore that is one of the best on the market and is very inexpensive. Some hospital or clinic dictation systems, unfortunately, make no allowance for using abbreviation software or features.

Get Rid of Rodents

Most professionals who use word-processing software avoid using their desktop mouse like the plague. Taking your fingers from the keyboard slows you down, so if you want to really churn out the work you must learn keyboard shortcuts for as many actions as possible. Most word-processors give a keyboard equivalent for an action you point to with your mouse, especially on main menu items.

Using shortcut keys in Windows

Learning the shortcut keystrokes for Windows (see table below) will help you perform general program actions faster. Many of the Windows commands are common to most windows programs. If you are currently using word-processor specific commands that correspond to the commands below, you may want to consider changing your word-processor preferences to match these common shortcut keys.

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