Advanced Speed Typing 98: The End of Two-Finger Typing!

It never ceases to amaze me when I look around my office, and I still see people using the famous "two-finger typing technique." Many of my coworkers are office professionals, some of whom have been office workers for as long as I've been alive. Yet, they still never took the time to learn to type.

I've seen lots of people develop it as an art, and end up typing up to 30 words per minute that way. So I'm not saying it's bad...it's just kind of inefficient. It might be faster initially, but after learning the proper hand placement on the keyboard and getting the layout permanently implanted into your brain...there's no way two-finger typing is a timesaver!

It's just learning that can be the hard part.

Enter this week's shareware program: Advanced Speed Typing 98.

AST 98 is available from the Letter Chase website in a 30 day trial version. It requires Windows 95/98, and a 600 by 800 monitor resolution. The licensed version costs just $19.40, and you can order from the pop-up window when you start the program.

I tested AST 98 myself, and I was pretty impressed. It can be used either by typists just beginning to learn the keyboard's layout, or by experienced typists who want to increase their speed. The menus at the top are laid out so that you can easily find your typing skill level and focus on the areas you need to improve. The beginning, intermediate, and advanced menus include such options as practicing words with common letter combinations, which allows you to find your trouble spots. You can also try short or more difficult sentences as you get more advanced. When you're tired of just the drills, you can test your skill with the speed/accuracy tests, or the games called Letter Chase and Word Chase which are included in the options.

I tried most of the features of AST 98, and it really does achieve its goal. I've been typing regularly for over five years now, and as I used this program, I could feel my fingers growing more oriented to the specific spots on the keyboard where I make most of my mistakes. A thing about this program which is better than some other typing programs was that it allows you to fix mistakes, except in some of the games. I always wondered what the point was in programs that don't allow you to fix your mistakes. Accuracy is just as important as speed, and this program recognizes that.

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