One of the biggest time saving tools I have encountered on a computer is text expansion. In its simplest form, text expansion is typing a small bit of text, which then automatically expands to a longer string of text. You could think of it as similar to writing an abbreviation, but with additional power and features. Using text expansion, when I type the shortcut “;ph” in any text field on my Mac, it expands to my complete office phone number. Text expansion can be used for both small strings of text, like phone numbers and email addresses, as well as longer items–even paragraphs of boilerplate. While a phone number here and there might seem insignificant, when I consider the number of times I type the same things daily it really adds up. According to the stats in TextExpander¹, my text expansion app of choice, I’ve saved about 650,000 keystrokes. At a rate of 40 words per minute, this equates to about 55 hours, which is about 18 hours a year during the three years or so I’ve been using the app.

With TextExpander, some elaborate text expansion magic is at your fingertips. To whet your automation imagination, here are a just a few ways I use the app:

Stock phrases

In the course of a day, I have numerous terms and phrases I type repeatedly. This might be a function of higher education work, but I find myself repeating the same words especially when writing notes after advising appointments. I have made shortcuts for these, which can be handy when squeezing in notes at the end of one appointment before the next student arrives. So “;ud” expands to upper-division, “;lcb” expands to Lundquist College of Business, and so forth.

URLs/links

There are a number of URLs, many of which go deep into websites, that I insert frequently into emails and other documents. I have a group of shortcuts that I use the prefix “;hl” to indicate it will expand to a link. For example “;hlpre” expands to the link for the pre-business requirements on our college website. You can even format links, so they appear as such in your documents. I write my URL shortcuts in Markdown syntax, so they appear already formatted as hyperlinks in the email or document (I mostly write email in Airmail and documents in Ulysses, which support Markdown). TextExpander also offers optionally-installable snippet groups (“snippet” is TextExpander’s term for shortcuts) that manipulate URLs, including processing a link through a shortening services, such as Tinyurl or Digg.

Date stamping

TextExpander includes functionality for date and time insertion with snippets. This will insert the date and/or time in multiple formats (long, short, ISO, etc.). I enter the current date frequently in advising notes and other places, and I use a “date stamp” shortcut that formats the date the same way every time. TextExpander can also perform day and time “math” to adjust the date or time when it executes a shortcut.

Email signatures

I use two email signatures, one for internal communications and a second for contacting students. I insert the desired one using text expansion at the end of each email. Snippets in TextExpander can be plain text, rich text, and even contain images, so you can easily create an elaborate set of signatures formatted to your liking.

Email and document templates

When I find myself replying to the same or similar emails, I create a stock reply, assign it a TextExpander shortcut rather than re-writing the same message each time. TextExpander’s features make this really powerful. You can simulate keystrokes, fill in information that will be added to your text, include optional text, and even do some date and time math! I routinely email our Registrar’s Office with updates to a student’s degree guide. I have a TextExpander snippet that I type in the “to:” field of a blank email message. It adds the appropriate email address, moves to the subject field and enters the stock subject, asks me for the student’s ID number and name, and lets me select the information to be updated. Once it has this information, the app inserts it in the stock text and the message is ready to send. I have about a half dozen of these and every time I see myself writing the same email, I create another snippet for it. This can be done with longer pieces of text like disclaimers or conditions and canned letters. Other email text templates I use include:

• how to make an advising appointment
• a blurb summarizing major requirements and where to find them online
• notification I have authorized a student to register for a class requiring departmental approval

If you send the same (or even similar) emails regularly, text expansion can be a life saver.

Text expansion is some of the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to automation. It offers tremendous power for just a few minutes of set-up time. You can get up and running with most text expansion utilities very quickly and before you know it, you’ll find enormous opportunities for automation. One warning–once you experience the magic of text expansion, you’ll never go back to plain old typing again!

1. Smile Software offers both a subscription and stand alone version of TextExpander. You can run a trial version of the stand alone version for 30 days to try text expansion for yourself. ↩︎