The role of short form rules

Instant Text is different from other expander products in the sense that instead of defining a unique abbreviation for a word or a phrase, the short form defines a complete scope of possible abbreviations.

That is why the Short for words shows you the whole word in the Expansion table, and you can choose the best abbreviation by typing the 1st letter and any letter thereafter left to right.

For the phrases Instant Text uses the initials of the words. This usually works fine, except for 2-word phrases where you quickly have a lot of duplicate short forms, lots of ca and pc etc.

The new short form rules in Instant Text 8 allow for augmenting the scope of possible abbreviations by changing the rules. So the best way to do this is for 2-word phrases to define the short form rule as word1_word2. Then you can type any subset of letters starting with the 1st letter and any letter thereafter left to right.

So the Short cardiovascular_disease will allow you to use the abbreviation you want: cavdisease or even just cavdis. :-)

This will save you a lot of editing.

Still, I understand your desire of having the Find function in the Convert Short Form window. I think it's already on the wishlist and you can always use the Ctrl F keyboard shortcut!