How to save time with TextExpander

hello and welcome to another one of my productivity training videos today I want to give you an introduction and kind of a getting started tutorial on how to use text expander now text expander is a tool I've been using for a number of years now and basically what it does for those of you who haven't heard for it out of it is text expander is a text expansion tool so what I mean is you can program in any text you want things like email templates are a really good example to start with so let's say you have an email template and you have an abbreviation or a snippet that you can type on your keyboard in different applications that will then have text expander fill out that template anywhere you like so basically what this tool is doing is its allowing you to program in text lots of text that you quickly fill out so use cases how can you use this like I said email templates are great whatever your line of work whatever you do like there's probably emails that you kind of send again and again and again so programming in email templates is a very wait a very good way to get started with text expander I also use text expander for things like links you know we all will have like different links that we need to send people on a regular basis so I have a bunch of affiliate links in here I've got links calendly links where people can book calls with me I've got links to different parts of my website YouTube playlists any of these kind of links that you often have to send people rather than you know going to the web finding the right page copying it actually using text expander will save you a ton of time so links are great shorthand just little phrases like when I'm writing emails I have little phrases like this please let me know if there's anything you need there's lots of little things that I like to say just when writing emails and so having little phrases like this programmed in means even if I have to write an email manually I can actually speed that up a lot by using these little shorthand expressions like let me know if there's anything else you need anything in the meantime thanks for your patience all these little things you might say I've even got Corrections in here for some reason with the word doesn't I always type it wrong I put the apostrophe in the wrong place I put the apostrophe between the s and the T so I actually have text expand fix that for me for some reason the keyboard my Mac doesn't pick this up but text expander I can tell and and with the word from the my fingers just go too fast and I type it from T and then he so I always do that wrong so I actually have text expander fix those kind of Corrections for me and then even I use it with my task management tool like asana so things like blog posts when I have a task and I create a task for a new blog post I can actually use text expander to quickly create a number of subtasks so that I can quickly set up the steps that I need to do so those are a few examples let me actually show you how you would set up a new snippet so let's let's set up a new email template so I'm gonna just come to my this is just my folders here these are just ways of categorizing everything so you don't have one long list so I'm gonna go to my email folder I'm gonna create a new snippet now the first thing we can do actually first thing I'm gonna do is write the subject of my email so let's just say I don't know let's just say welcome and now I'm gonna leave a space where I might want to put the person's name so I'm actually gonna use a fill in here and I'm gonna say have a single line fill in and I'm just gonna call this field name okay now what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to have text expander emulate the tab key on my keyboard so it can tab to the body of the email so let's use the tab key here and I'm gonna tab and I'm actually just gonna copy that five times I think it's five times we'll test it in a minute then what I'm gonna do is say hi and I'm gonna put the person's name again so I'm actually might just copy this or let's just do it again so let's go high fill in single line name and because I've got the same name in here it says name here and name there whatever I type in there it will actually copy and now I'm gonna write my email so this is my welcome email thanks okay so that's my email ready to go I'm just gonna give this a label the label is really just used to highlight what this is about so let's just say welcome email and then down here we set the abbreviation so this is the actual snippet or the trigger that you use to trigger this email snippet to be used now you can see with all of my snippets here I've actually used a semicolon at the start of all of these snippets because I don't want to accidentally trigger my my snippet so if I like with this one it has the word Anna I don't want to accidentally trigger that when I write the word Anna so I have a semicolon so let's just say semicolon welcome test oh that's already taken let's say email email welcome note that's taken let's let's use a different code let's do : welcome okay so now if I go to my email let's start on your email and now if I put my cursor in the subject line I can then go : welcome and let's it's popped up on my other window it brings up this little pop-up box where I can fill in the name now so let's say John and you can see it's copied the John to the next field here I'm gonna click OK and you can see textexpander typed the subject and because I told it to emulate the tab key actually tabbed one two three four five times to the body of the email before it continued the rest of its snippet and then it's pasted the rest of my email so that's a very simple example I could actually take this a step further as well so you can include things like optional sections so this is an OP let's actually let's just leave that blank I can say here this is an optional section so when I program listen if I go back to my email and do it again welcome and now bring that over here now I have this little checkbox that I can use to turn this on and off so this is really useful if you have sentences or phrases as paragraphs in your email that you maybe don't want to include necessarily all the time so I have it checked by default and now I can click OK and it's included that specific sentence so using the optional optional selection is a great way of including like conditional content some other things you can do you've got pop-up menus so for example maybe you instead of an optional section you can actually have a menu where you can toggle between 2 or 3 different sentences if you need to and like I said it can emulate keystrokes so you've got the tab key the return key so as you saw I was able to mimic the tab key so I could actually have text expander fill out things like the subject and then tab to the body and fill that out for me text expander can also do some really cool things like it can find the day and the month tab which which is really useful for naming things like files if you have receipts and things so here's that here's a file in my my downloads here if I want to rename this I could use the abbreviation semi colon date and you can actually see it's now spat out today's date which is 2018 the year September oh nine and the sixth so out funnel excuse me text expander can even recognize dates and use those dates in your snippets as well so that's a very simple example with an email template let me show you a couple more here so let's do the asana example let's show you what that looks like so with the blog subtasks I literally just have each subtask on a new line because that's kind of how it works in a sauna so if I come over here here's a blog post idea I can then start a subtask and because with asana anyway if you go onto a new line or if you hit return on your keyboard it goes on to a new line I can actually type blog sub and now it spits out all of my subtasks for me so this is a great way when I have a new idea I can I can write it in a sauna and I have all of the subtasks all of the things I need to do ready to go so it speeds up task management for me as well I've also used text expander for like I said links so I've got things like calendly pull so I can send someone this link and what's going a bit slow but there it is it's it's generated the link for me if I need to send someone my booking link or I can even send someone my website link so I can say semicolon website and there's the link to my website so text expander is one of those tools when you just start using it a little bit I generally recommend people get started with a few email templates because that's one of the simple examples but once you start using it for a couple of things it's amazing you'll find use cases for it all over the place and you basically want to think anytime I have to go and find information that I want to copy whether it's a link or emails you can actually program that all into text expander which will save you a ton of time when it comes to typing and actually if I look at my statistics here you can see some quite cool things here so in the last month I've done you know 44 different snippets minutes saved last you know in the last few weeks like I didn't can't quite interpret this I think we're looking at I don't know a few hours worth of time here um I actually got an email the other day from text expander that said I'd saved something like five hours last month just on typing because I'm using text expander to speed up my typing so there you are that is a little introduction to text expander this is probably one of my favorite productivity tools I've been using it for a few years it really has made me so much more efficient so definitely give it a check out highly recommend it if you have any questions about text expander please let me know in the comments below thank you very much for watching this video and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Paul Minors

Views: 7,890

Keywords: textexpander, productivity, text expansion

Id: 8M1ZIEAJbEs

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 26 2018