To Whom It May Concern:

I work for a BPO that does medical transcription where we use an application
called Instant Text to help our transcriptionists enhance the speed of their
work. You can get details of this application from
http://fitaly.com/new/version5.htm. However, I will give a brief overview here.

Instant Text (IT) is a word and phrase expander software like "Fast Forward" and
"Smartype" that can be linked to any active application on the desktop.  It is
used by medical transcriptionists (MT) to save time on keying in redundant words
and phrases that occur in medical reports.  For example, the text string "The
patient is a well-developed and well-nourished" occurs in almost every
dictation, and an MT who uses IT just has to key in the initial letter of each
word and then press the phrase expander to get the whole string in the desired
format i.e., in the example above, 7 keystrokes instead of 49.  The latest
version of IT has an additional feature called command coding where the user can
execute keyboard shortcuts via IT.

Now, let me come to the issue.
1.  When IT links, it gets linked to the entire OOo suite and not individual
applications like Writer or Calc, whereas when used with MS Office, there is the
flexibility of linking IT to either MS Word or MS Excel or MS Powerpoint alone
as appropriate.
2.  IT cannot be used with files opened as "Read Only" because the moment a key
is pressed a message pops up that says "Document opened in read-only mode." 
This plays havoc with keyboard command execution via IT.  It would be great if,
in this regard, MS Excel behavior can be copied to Calc where the user is
allowed to modify the read-only document but the modified document can be saved
only as a separate file.

I hope I am clear on this.

Thank you,
Aji