Breaking changes in PhraseExpander 5
PhraseExpander 5 has been redesigned from the ground up to make it faster and more powerful and, although we did our best to preserve all the functionalities present in v.4, we had to make some important changes.
Most of them are automatically accommodated during the migration of your data from v.4 to v.5. Others would require some manual changes or slight adjustment to your templates.
Extract & Send Macro: this macro is no longer available in v.5
Clipboard Action macro: this macro is no longer available in v.5
Clipboard Set macro: this macro is no longer available in v.5
Variables cannot contain interactive macros: variables can contain only non-interactive macros (interactive macros are the ones that interrupt the execution flow, like wait, run application, send keystrokes).
SetPhrase macro → Set macro: the SetPhrase macro is used to assign the contents of a phrase. In PhraseExpander 5 the macro has been renamed to set. The set macro needs the ID to assign the contents of a template, so it needs to be recreated manually. Counters are no longer supported in the macro. You can create counters with variables and the Update variable macro and then save the final value into a template with the set macro.
Update macro with counters: if you are using counters to calculate scores, the final result may be off by 1 (so the result you get is 1 when all items are unchecked). You'll most likely need to remove the following instruction{#update 1 -[inc=1][name=score]#} (where
Insert phrase → Insert template:in PhraseExpander 5 templates are inserted by using an Id, and you can no longer insert multiple phrases (selecting them by abbreviation or description). Glossaries and groups can be selected by Description only. The result of an Insert template macro will always be a single item (or none). If more than one item matches the criteria, PhraseExpander will return the first item. If you are currently using the Insert template macro to return multiple items, you'll need to check and update your templates manually.
The inserted template will be automatically converted to plain text (the ability to include formatted templates will be reintroduced shortly after the final release).
Input Form macro: the macro has been removed as all the user input fields are automatically displayed in a single form.
Note Manual Input: the Note Manual Input has been removed in PhraseExpander 5 because each fill-in variable can have a comment. When migrating from v.4 to v.5 Notes Manual Inputs will be converted to comments and attached to the following fill-in variable.
Autofill with selection in Manual Inputs: the default content of a manual input cannot be populated based on a text selection when invoked by shortcut. This has nothing to do with the shortcuts used to add a phrase into PhraseExpander, which will continue to work.
Single manual inputs: when a phrase contains manual inputs (now called fill-in variables) they are always displayed together in a single form. There's no longer the option to show them separately (in v.4 they were shown separately in the Standard Edition or the Professional edition if no Input Form macro was present).
Run macro inside File Open/Save dialogs: If a template containing a run macro is executed in the file textbox inside the Open/Save file dialog, it will no longer be expanded into text but it will perform the standard action of launching the application.
Empty contents phrases: in PhraseExpander v4 if you created an empty phrase and set only the Description, PhraseExpander will pick that up. In v5 you need to make sure you put data in the contents. So to fix this, copy the description in the contents.