PLEASE NOTE: Effective October 31, 2020 ActiveWords Version 3 will no longer be licensed All version 3 licenses purchased up to that point will be valid from one year from the date of purchase. Please take advantage of the free ActiveWords 4 Upgrade at your earliest convenience.
If you have not already installed ActiveWords 4 click here to register a trial. Download and license activation instructions are provided by email. Check here for what's new in version 4.
ActiveWords Version 3 and 4 co-exist as separate installations but cannot be run at the same time. Be sure to set ActiveWords 3 to NOT start with Windows (see the "Services" tab of the ActiveWords 3 Options dialog). Once you decide to use Version 4 exclusively, you can uninstall Version 3.
The first time ActiveWords 4 is run any ActiveWords 3 data is automatically imported. Version 3 "Group" ActiveWords will be converted to Version 4 Tags, associating the matching Actions.
Import may take several minutes and you should not exit ActiveWords 4 until the import and icon update processes complete. Click on the ActiveWords Icon to open the list view and you should see "Importing..." in the lower left corner, followed by "Refreshing icons." Windows 10 users will receive a notification when the import is complete. You can also manually import ActiveWords 3 data files.
After importing ActiveWords 3 data, ActiveWords 4 will look for and associate icons with File, Folder, Program, and URL Actions. The process of looking up icons may take several minutes after initial import of ActiveWords 3 data.
Most ActiveWords 3 Actions that use the command will be imported and converted to ActiveWords 4 format. Other scripted ActiveWords 3 Actions are not imported as ActiveWords 4 required development of a new scripting language.
You will need to edit the Description field of RTF and HTML substitutions imported from ActiveWords 3 to get them to substitute RTF and HTML instead of plain text. The edit can be as simple as just adding a space to the Description field. (Long story, but we can’t do anything about this. New RTF and HTML substitutions should work fine.)