Why you should use TextExpander

Have you ever thought about how much time you actually spend typing every day? Chatting with your team, emailing clients, creating materials, updating systems. No matter what area of ops you’re in, you’re probably writing for most of your day.

At least that’s my reality as an Operations Manager, which is why I want to share the tool that’s most useful for me day in and day out: TextExpander.

The idea behind TextExpander is straightforward. It’s an app that turns a few keystrokes of your choice into:

words, sentences, paragraphs
phone numbers, addresses, links
symbols, emojis, gifs, images
automatically calculated dates and times
customizable texts
and so much more

Why should you use TextExpander?

The way TextExpander works is effortless, but what it can do for you is surprisingly significant.

Save time

It might seem like needing to type a few extra letters or words here and there wouldn’t matter. But it really adds up!

Proof? TextExpander’s stats show that, in the five or so years I’ve used the app, it’s saved me 611 hours. That’s 76 days working days.

As much as I love my job, I definitely appreciate the extra time off from TextExpander. 🏖

Stop mistakes

You have enough to think about without needing to worry that a typo in an email address could derail your urgent message or a mis-remembered price could upset your new customer.

TextExpander frees you from doubt by making sure you get important info right every time. Put it in the app once, and be confident that it’s correct from then on.

Stay consistent

Writing well can take some serious brain power and a lot of hours. When you’ve already put together some great text, why waste time and energy trying to re-create that magic?

TextExpander lets you take advantage of your past-you brilliance by giving you quick access to your best texts in the future too. (Hear that? Yep, it’s your brain breathing a sigh of relief.)

TextExpander In Action

Now that you know how it works, you might be starting to think that TextExpander could be pretty helpful in theory. But seeing it in action can really give you a sense of how simple yet powerful it can be.

Let’s take a look at just a few of the maaaaaany ways TextExpander can make your work a little or a lot less demanding.

Set-up

First, a quick peek at setting up an abbreviation (what you actually type) and text (what that abbreviation turns into) in TextExpander.

Once you open the TextExpander app (which you can do with a quick “hotkey”, like mine: alt + e), you just:

1. Go to TextExpander

2. Click Add Snippet

3. Enter your abbreviation

4. Enter your text

5. Click Save

If you want to go further with formatting, auto-calculating dates and times, fill-ins, etc. (more on these below), you can do that at the same time. But, usually, you just need to take these few quick steps before you can start text expanding.

Here’s a bunch of gifs showing me doing just that: typing the abbreviation I chose and then TextExpander turning it into the text. All the gifs were made by me just recording my screen so this really is TextExpander IRL.

(By the way, my TextExpander abbreviations are ones I find easy to remember. But, when you have your own TextExpander, you’ll of course be able to create whatever abbreviations—and texts—you want.)

Examples

No more sifting through bookmarks or googling for links you share often! Put them in TextExpander once, and you’ll also have them in a split second.

Emoji pickers are nice and all, but who doesn’t want their favorite emojis even faster?

Forget having to remember whether a company writes its name with words or camel case or what, much less having to write the whole name out every time.

Nail the spelling (in this case, of the city where I live in Finland), no matter what keyboard you’re on.

Who can even remember what day it is nowadays? With TextExpander, just set up the snippet below once, and you’ll always have the date at your fingertips:

And you can even add some formatting for a little “fanciness”. ✨✨

Speaking of fancy, TextExpander also does the heavy lifting when it comes to special bits of text that are super effective but not easy to remember or type.

For example, drop this formula in your Gmail search bar, and you’ll get all the messages you sent in Gmail last week in an instant.

And you can wrap up all your emails with this friendly closing with just two keystrokes.

Or be sure you’re never scrambling to get your daily update into Slack.

TextExpander gives you the outline complete with (Slack-friendly) markdown formatting and the cursor waiting in the exact right place for you to start typing.

And you can even make sure you always have your logo at the ready with TextExpander.

While the examples above would already have you covered in so many situations, if you want to really harness the power of TextExpander, watch this quick video for a taste of how customizable texts can streamline your work even more.

So there you have it! A lot of examples but just a tiny fraction of everything you can do with TextExpander.

Save time, stop mistakes, and stay consistent with TextExpander