I am not the fastest typist. Any tips for how to improve, or is there any software that can help me work around this?

We feel you. Some nameless citizens of Mac|Life Nation are hunt-and-peckists, while others’ fingers are flying so fast, it’s a wonder we don’t see smoke rising from their keyboards. Luckily, we’ve got a few suggestions for speeding up anyone’s processing of words.

TextExpander 2 ($29.95, www.smileonmymac.com) is a handy utility that lets you set up abbreviations (like keyboard shortcuts) for snippets of frequently used text. Instead of typing www.maclife.com, you could type ml and watch as it’s magically expanded. You can even keep your snippets and abbreviations synced between all of your Macs, if you’re a MobileMe customer. We gave TextExpander 2 a perfect 5-star score in the Aug/08 issue.

Arcade Typing Tutor reminds us of Missile Command, only more educational.

If your brain thinks alphabetically, and you just never got used to the standard QWERTY keyboard, the Fast Finger keyboard (2 out of 5 stars, Aug/09) gives you the option of an alphabetical layout, starting with A in the upper-left and winding down to Z in the lower-right. It’s not specifically made for Macs (relocating the Command key, although you can fix that in System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard > Modifier Keys), but it might help. For more text-related productivity tips and pointers about our favorite text apps, see “Meet the Textperts”.

Of course, you could always improve your skills by practicing. Fast Rabbit Typing ($9.95, fastrabbitsoftware.com) and Arcade Typing Tutor ($11.99, homepage.mac.com/whiteman/ATT.html) are fun shareware typing games you might try.

If you’re looking to ditch your keyboard altogether, MacSpeech’s Dictate ($199, www.macspeech.com) is a sophisticated speech-recognition app that lets you speak into a headset and types what you say. This won’t help improve your typing one bit, but it can save you a ton of time.