Something always changes. A company rebrands, a support address moves, a product gets a new name. If that detail is sitting inside the text you have saved in ActiveWords, it is probably sitting in more than one place. Quick Edit, also called Bulk Edit, fixes all of it in one step. It has a companion on the same menu, Words, which does the same job for the Words and Triggers that run your Actions. One changes what your Actions say. The other changes what sets them off.

Find and replace, across as many Actions as you like

Think of the notes you send constantly. A follow-up note, a scheduling reply, a handover summary. Your clinic or company name is in all of them, more than once in some. When that name changes, every one of them is suddenly wrong.

Select them in the ActiveWords list, right-click, and choose Quick Edit. Tick whether you want to search the Action, the Description, or both, type what you are looking for and what should replace it, then click Update. Every selected Action is rewritten, and every occurrence inside each one is caught, not just the first.

It is not limited to text substitutions either. If an Action opens a URL, Quick Edit will edit the address, which makes a moved page or a changed domain a ten-second fix across a whole set of shortcuts.

A few things worth knowing

Quick Edit matches upper and lower case exactly, so Clinic will not find clinic. If you leave Replace with empty, the text you searched for is removed wherever it appears, which is a quick way to strip a line that is no longer needed. And nothing outside your selection is touched, so you can be as broad or as careful as you like.

One thing to watch: Substitute Content Actions, which hold formatted content, are left out. If Quick Edit is greyed out when you expected it to work, check whether one of them is sitting in your selection. Leave it out and the rest can be edited together.

The other half: the Words themselves

Quick Edit changes what an Action contains. The Words item on the same right-click menu changes what triggers it. Select one or more Actions and choose Words, and you get a single window listing every Word attached to them, each with its own Trigger. It is the place to give an Action a shorter alternative Word, or to tidy up ones you no longer use.

For the full walkthrough, including when Quick Edit is greyed out and what the Words window does, see the Quick Edit FAQ. New to ActiveWords 5? Read the Version 5 announcement or download the free trial.