Also, when the shortcut is one or more letters that are commonly used or are often part of common words, I'll add the hyphen so the shortcut isn't triggered when I'm typing those letters or words. If I want to use a shortcut but not use it all of the time, I'll put a hyphen (-) behind the shortcut, so I have to enter both the shortcut and the hyphen in order for it to be triggered. You can set up shortcuts that are automatically triggered as soon as you type them, or you can set up shortcuts that are only used if you type a hyphen after them. number, city, phone number, words I commonly use, other peoples' names I frequently use, phrases I often use, words I often mistype (so they are automatically corrected if I type them wrong), usernames I use, email addresses I use, various numbers I frequently use, urls, or generally any words and/or phrases I find myself typing frequently. I use shortcuts for my first name, last name, street address, apt. It can be words or phrases or even multiple paragraphs of text! I pick the first thing that pops into my mind as the shortcut, since it just makes sense to me to use that shortcut (like using la- for Los Angeles the hyphen prevents the expander from playing out Los Angeles in any words that us "la" within the word). If I notice that I'm starting to use something frequently, I'll make a shortcut for it. I currently have 249 shortcuts saved, so you can see that I'm an avid user of this wonderful utility. I use it continuously through my days, for so many things. It's been readily available in the many Debian/Ubuntu distros I've used or tried. There are two versions available: autokey-gtk and autokey-qt. I'm really glad I found out about Linux, and now I can see how far better it is than using Windows, after many years of using Windows.
I constantly used the Smart Type Assistant app in Windows and really wanted to find a good replacement for it when I came to Linux. AutoKey has been a tremendous help to me since I discovered it, after moving from Windows to Linux! I want you to have the experience of seeing how much time and frustration you can avoid by using AutoKey, if it makes sense to you to use it. Creating the shortcut is slightly tricky, but I'll covert hat in the Creating a Shortcut section below.
From my experience of using AutoKey for some 5-6 years now, I suspect those authors didn't fully understand how to use AutoKey well. And then you have to run the script when you want to use it. It can, indeed, do scripts, but you have to tell AutoKey that it's a script when you create it. I've also seen elsewhere that others said it couldn't do scripts. Two of those posts mentioned AutoKey, but both authors were discouraged by it. And I didn't readily find any other posts about using AutoKey. All of that post's entries date back to 2016. I believe that AutoKey needs to be easily found and recognized for its valuable contribution to the Linux community. So I decided to create this post to provide relevant information about AutoKey. There is a similar forum topic at, but it is closed. My purpose in creating this post is to help show them that. I suspect that people who aren't using one have no clue how much wasted time and unnecessary frustration they would avoid if they were using one. So I decided to create this post about AutoKey, since using a text expander can be a time- and effort-reducing application that can save countless keystrokes, time, and effort when it's set up for words and phrases which you frequently use but wouldn't have to completely type every time you use them, if you were using a text expander. I'm sure glad I found it when I first began to use Linux! There are some others, but they are far less user-friendly and helpful than AutoKey. AutoKey seems to be the most advanced and most prominent text expander in the Linux community. I'm using a syntax that makes copy-pasting easy, please see the bolded parts of the code.Something I saw earlier today prompted me to do a search for the phrase "text expanders in Linux". It expands all record fields automatically.
#"Expanded Value" = Table.ExpandRecordColumn(#"Converted to Table", "Value", )))) #"Converted to Table" = Record.ToTable(Source), Source = Json.Document(File.Contents("Location of JSON file")), The way I use this now forces me with every refresh to to go into the query editor and select all the columns manually to be able to expand them all.
However these "columns" have many values which with every new dataset are different.
The column that remains I than have to expand again. I than do an unpivot step to reduce the number of columns (which contain records). My JSON has a number of levels which I expand to reach. I've stumbled upon many threads about JSON files and how to use them in Power BI, but I can't however find the issue that I am facing.