Typing Master Express Review

This program comes jam-packed with features but falls short of its claims on many levels.

I have been touch-typing for the past 3 years and can type at a speed of over 60 wpm. Unforunately, when I tried some of the basic excercises and typed the way they wanted me to, I was only able to type at about 16 wpm! The reason being that they assume that everyone who touch types does it the perfect way! Now, although, I realise that the program's aim is probably to teach you how to touch-type the ideal way, it needs to have a little more leeway in its teaching. Other than this small point, the basic excercises are excessive and extremely long! They expect you to spend 3-5 hours just typing letters that don't even spell out anything which is lame and boring.

The second step in this step-wise course is a feature I have never seen in programs of this nature: a satellite as they like to call it. This handy features allows you to have the program running in your taskbar while you type on a daily basis logging what mistakes you make regularly and analyzing your typing habits! This allows you to gain a better understanding of how you type when you are just typing casually. The program also allows you to tailor your excercises based on the difficulties it detected you having in your day to day typing habits!

Step 3 of this program is once again quite boring as they expect you to build up your typing speed with excercises that are once again based on letters. Although, a few of the excercises spell out words, these words are mostly words that the average population would not have heard of and are words that you will probably never have to type. Not only this, the words are not actually part of a sentence which makes it harder to type at a good speed.

As you could probably tell, I am against most of the methods that they have used for teaching how to touch-type, however, the program does have some handy features if you are able to buckle down and complete the boring excercises. It has a review section where it allows you to practice words that contain the letters or numbers that you had the most trouble with during the learning process. It also has some games which they have used to try and make the program interesting, however, I found the games to be mostly lame personally.

The best part of the software, unfortunately, are perhaps the typing tests which are not without flaws. The program features about 20 different articles which you must type out in a certain time limit while it assesses your typing speed and accuracy. It then generates a report which you can print out or save for your records. Unfortunately, the software is a bad judge of accuracy as it counts mistakes by the size of the word so if you spell a long word like "something" as "somethign", it will affect your score more than if you spelled "toy" as "tyo". It also does the same if you spell something with a capital letter instead of a small letter. These factors, unfortunately, affect your accuracy score alot, therefore, rendering it somewhat useless. Unfortunately, there are no options that you can change to affect the stringent rules it has programmed into it for judging accuracy.

Although, this software has a few good features, it can only help you become a better typist to a small degree and perhaps fill a few of your hours trying to do better on the typing tests, however, it is very improbable that you will be able to increase your typing speed by 4 times unless you are extremely devoted.

Personally, there is better software than this out there in this category.