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How to Use Text Expansion: Text expansion is a bit like predictive typing or auto-complete on a cell phone. It lets you type a long string of text by entering a shorter string. It’s like putting a word, phrase, or sentence on a keyboard shortcut. When you use a text expansion app, it watches what you type and when you type a certain string of letters, it replaces those letters with a piece of text that you’ve already set up.
It could be your name, your address, or a whole paragraph that you’ve saved. Think about how many times you type the same thing over and over, like your email address. Some of us type phrases like “Tell me what you think” many times a day. Text expansion lets you type a phrase with just a few letters instead of typing it all out.
How to Use Text Expansion
To use Text Expander with teams, you need to subscribe to Teams. You can share the snippets with your team so that everyone in the company can use the same text. When teams use Text Expander, they can stay consistent. Make forms with fields so that team members can fill in the right information and keep the document uniform.
You can make a team member an authorised editor, and everyone on the team will get the new snippets automatically. Manage tens of thousands of snippets easily with a team from all over the world. This keeps everyone from using different words, phrases, images, etc.
Setting up Snippets
- Creating your own snippets: Get started by creating a few of your own snippets from Clipboard History or from scratch.
- Set up snippet auto-expansion: Set up auto-expansion in a few seconds, so that you can expand your snippets just like magic!
- Using dynamic placeholders in snippets: Add a date, time, clipboard content and more with dynamic content. Use date arithmetic to paste in dates and times in the past or future.
- Tips for better snippet expansion: A few tricks to help you set the best keywords for your snippets, so that they’re easy to use, but aren’t accidentally typed!
- Browsing snippets: Using the snippets viewer is a handy way to view your snippets and collections.
- Using the “snip” keyword: Type snip followed by your keyword to show your snippet in Alfred.
- Sharing your snippets: Export your snippets for sharing, and save a friend or colleague a lot of time too!
- Using Snippets to Trigger Workflow: Use a snippet in a workflow to trigger an action on your Mac by simply typing your text snippet.
What do text expansion tools do?
You can use, change, and add your own snippets with these tools. This will help you quickly add any copy you use often. To use a text expansion tool, you have to type the shortcut for the text you want to replace. Each snippet links to a template that will automatically replace your shortcut. Text Expander comes with a library full of snippets that you are most likely to need, but you can also add as many of your own as you want.
- Fill in your organization’s name
- Insert an email template to ask for a customer’s testimonial
- Answer FAQs for clients and team members
- Quickly add today’s date and the time
FAQ
How do you use text expanders?
No matter where you are typing, you can use the global shortcut (-/ on Mac, Ctrl-/ on Windows) to open a TextExpander search window. Just type a few letters to find your snippet, hit the Return key, and your snippet will instantly grow.
Are text expanders safe?
The TextExpander app is not a safe way to share private information. If someone gets into your computer account, they can see your Snippets just like they can see any other file on your computer. If this worries you and you have a Mac, you can use Apple’s FileVault to make things even safer.