💾 Discoveries: Text Expander

If you need more time to meet your goals, you have to automate the daily flow of work.

In my ever-expanding effort to eliminate repetitive tasks, I decided to re-evaluate my options for text expansion. Text Expansion is when you type a small unique sequence of letters, symbols, or numbers (called a snippet), and your computer instantly substitutes that string with a predefined phrase. So when I type “zdrop” it substitutes “zdrop” for “Here is a dropbox folder with the slides from my presentation. Let me know if you have issues opening or if you want me to share some other way (google, box, etc.) .”

There are several ways to expand text using the tools built into windows and OSX, but they are a little clunky. I found that many folks recommended the Text Expander service, and after a 30 days trial, I decided it was worth the money for a subscription.

Text Expander is relatively cheap and synchronizes expansion “snippets” across multiple devices, and it works in all my programs (messages, WhatsApp, word, emails, etc.). Enabling suggestions will cause it to watch what you are typing and when it sees that you type the exact phrase several times, it will make a suggestion to turn that into a snippet. It also works with my project management software Asana, so I can quickly enter subtasks or comments. For more details on all the ways, you can use TextExpander, check out this video from Paul Minors.