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# Cache and Purge

As you dictate, and as Dragon Dictate types text for you, it also remembers the text that it types for you. That’s why you can use commands like Go To End or Move Backward Five Words to navigate and edit your text: Dragon Dictate can navigate this text because it created this text. Dragon Dictate also maintains recordings of your voice, and alternative interpretations of what you said. That’s why voice playback and phrase training are possible. All of this information is kept in the cache.

### When to Cache

The “Cache” commands help you handle situations such as these:

- When you say Cache Document, you’re telling Dragon Dictate to read the whole document’s contents, no matter how those contents were created. Dragon Dictate forgets what it entered in this document, throws away its recordings of your voice (so training on existing text is no longer possible), and just reads the document. Now it knows what the document contains, so now you can tell Dragon Dictate to navigate the document and to enter and edit text.

- Alternatively, you can say Cache Selection. This is like Cache Document, but it works on just the currently selected text. Dragon Dictate now knows about a limited region of the document. Commands for navigation, and entering and editing text, will work within this region. (To work with Dragon Dictate outside this region, you’d need to issue another “Cache” command.)

  > After Cache Selection, the commands Go To Beginning and Go To End mean: Go to the beginning or end of the cached region.

### When to Purge the Cache

To empty Dragon Dictate’s cache completely is called purging the cache:

- When you say Purge Cache, it’s like doing just the first half of a Cache Document command: Dragon Dictate forgets what it entered in this document, and doesn’t read the document. It just assumes the document is empty.

Consider, for example, a dialog consisting of two text fields. You dictate text into the first text field, then tab to the second text field and dictate text there. Dragon Dictate can’t “see” that there are two text fields; in its cache, it considers the first text and the second text to be part of one continuous stretch of text. This is going to lead to navigation errors! The solution is: As you start to work on the second text field, say Purge Cache. Now Dragon Dictate forgets what it did in the first text field and treats the second text field as a new empty world.

> Tabbing from field to field is such a common thing to do that Dragon Dictate includes two commands to help you with it: Next Field and Previous Field. These commands are in fact a combination of Purge Cache and pressing Tab or Shift-Tab. (Conversely, you should not use New Line or New Paragraph to move from field to field — or if you do, say Purge Cache immediately afterwards.)

### Note Pad Windows

A Note Pad window is exceptional. Dragon Dictate always knows the contents of a Note Pad window, because the window “belongs” to Dragon Dictate. So, in effect, the Cache Document command is automatically executed for you as required. When you open an existing document into a Note Pad window, or when you paste text into a Note Pad window, Cache Document is automatically executed. When you say Purge Cache in a Note Pad window, Cache Document is automatically executed. And Cache Selection is meaningless.

Still, Cache Document is useful in a Note Pad window, since you might want Dragon Dictate to forget how text was entered in the document, remove its recordings of your voice, and just start over, learning about the whole document from scratch. This could be helpful, for instance, when dictating a long document.