My Favorite Blackberry Text Tricks

I've been working with my Blackberry Curve for about a month now. One of the neat things BB does is use AutoText (Options | AutoText) where you can define abbreviated shortcuts that will automatically be written out for you when you type them.

I've found a few poorly documented tricks and used them to create some useful AutoText entries:

Date & Time
I find date and time stamps useful for documenting project time in the Memo App. Date and time stamp shortcuts were already defined in AutoText to return long date (day of week plus full date) and long time (full time). These are defined in the AutoText App as %D & %T. I created short time and date stamps by using lowercase d & t. In the examples below, the text in quotes is what you type to call up the autotext, the %+Char combo defines the output. I include sample output that results from the expanded text.

• Long Date "ld" %D
Wed, Apr 1, 2009
• Short Date "sd" %d
3/31/2009
• Long Time "lt" %T 4:32:56 PM
• Short Time "st" %t 4:38p

Ampersand
I use the ampersand a lot. Rather than always hitting SYMbol key + L I defined an AutoText "aa" as ampersand. Now I. Just type two a's and hit space to get &

Bullets
I also like to use bullets and tab bullets in text. I defined "bl" to return "•" And "blt" to return " •"

Backspace
In defining AutoText, %B means backspace. This is useful if you don't want a space after your replaced text. For instance, I've defined "http" to return "http://" by defining it as "http://%B" Without %B this would return "http:// "

You'll find loads of predefined typo corrections and text expanders by exploring Options | AutoText on your BB, including your PIN, Full Name, Signature (Owner) info. Check it out, create your own, and superrcharge your BB typing experience!