With Mac OS X I use Butler.

http://www.petermaurer.de/butler/

I'm using a Windows machine. For various reasons, I prefer that the software does not show up prominently on the screen. I'd just like to be able to past in, say, a paragraph of Boilerplate 1 using Contr-1, or something like that. Any ideas?

I beleive I've seen this done with simple macros in Word.

The most recent versions of Word (on Windows at least) have a souped-up clipboard that stores multiple snippets of text, though I don't know how long those snippets can live there.

Likely something like the clipboard or shelf in QuickSilver could do this nicely on the mac. As well, I really like Textpander for pasting items. I just wished it could do a bit of apple-scripting... but it works like a charm.

It only saves the text for a short time, in Word if you close the document its gone, in excel if you type in a cell its gone, I wish I could disable that worthless thing and just use the windows clipboard, it was another flop.

Create a simple marco and then save it inside the default template so it will be available in any document your working on. I have several I have to use to workaround Office's bugs and limitations.

I have ben meaning to try this, maybe it would work for you:

AutoHotkey is a free, open-source utility for Windows. With it, you can:
Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder.
6/13/2006 -- Clipped From the web document : AutoHotkey - Free Mouse and Keyboard Macro Program with Hotkeys and AutoText
http://www.autohotkey.com/

regards

I second that; I use AutoHotKey at work extensively, mimicking my Quicksilver triggers too. I couldn't live without it anymore. :(

Can ActiveWords maybe do this?

Yeah, this sounds right up ActiveWords' alley, actually based on what I know about it.

OT: I love TextExpander for something similar on the Mac (post coming on that soon)