TextExpander Tips and Tricks To Save You Hours

0:00 joining me all right welcome everyone it's great to see you this morning hello everyone my name is Mike Berta I'm responsible for sales and business development here at smile I do want to thank everyone for attending this webinar and this is the first in a number of webinars that we plan to provide providing the webinar today is Maya Olsen who you just heard from Maya leads our marketing and is responsible for customer experience she also knows TextExpander inside and out because of her years providing support now this webinar will focus largely on how an individual would use text expander if you're interested in exploring the benefits of text expander for teams after this webinar please feel

0:48 free to contact me directly about scheduling a training on that specific functionality and we will provide access to contact information after the webinar so with all that I will leave you in the very capable hands of Maya Olsen Maya take it away so to start I just want to make sure that everybody can see my screen I just want to double check you can all see my slides up there so you can type in yes oh thank you guys first funding all right let's get going so today we're here to learn all about Texas banners so I have been using text expander for many years now and I like to think of myself as a power user but

1:35 then I keep talking to other text expander users and learning the even more amazing things that they're doing so I hope to share some of those tips with you today so to start out I want to talk about what I hope you get out of this so I want you to get ideas about the sort of things that you can make into snippets to help you save major time I'll show off some of the features you may not have seen and also I want to make sure that you have your apps set up the best to work for you because there's a lot of preferences in settings so I want to make sure you have everything - just the way you need so to get started let me just show you a super quick little workflow I've made for

2:22 myself so this is just a series of stupid size setup because I answer a lot of email so these are all geared at answering emails so let's say I'm just introducing myself to some or someone has emailed me I'm answering a common question so I have a simple setup for in greeting because this is just another thing that I now don't have to think about and don't have to misspell I have snippets for all of the answers to common questions I get I have snippets for the standard closing statement that I'd like to have and actually I have several that I like to switch through so I've set up this pop-up field to let me choose between the ones that I have I feel like using this one today and then I also have a snippet for my signature

3:10 so that's just will glimpse into how I've set a series of snippets to work together for me so when you're thinking about things to make into snippets I want you to just take a look at everything that you are typing Dan and day out and think how I type this before do I not want to have to type this again well then you should make it into a snippet so there are a lot of things that you can turn into snippets personally I highly recommend you create a library of your own personal Mis typings misspellings so as you see here this is the text expander window and on

3:55 the Left I have my mini groups and so I have set up this group of all of my own personal autocorrects these are the things that don't show up in a normal autocorrect group but that my fingers just do not like spelling out so highly recommends that you have a group like that also any sort of brand name so there's actually a group that you can get for free it's in our public group so if you go to our website on public groups we have a brand names group that's up here at the top and that will help you correctly spell things like Facebook and MailChimp and WordPress and so that's

4:42 just so any of you can just come to this page and subscribe to this group to get those out of Corrections also any emojis or URL so I have URLs to all of the many things I have to sign in to on the web and this means that whenever I have to go somewhere I don't have to worry about using the wrong browser because I set up bookmarks in Chrome but this day I'm using a safari also I can search because you can search on your sniff it's very easily but I can't search through all of my saved book forms very easily so for example I'm going to clear out my scratch pad here so to get into we have various WordPress websites and so I have

5:30 a snippet set up that can switch between either of our WordPress website logins I have a snippet set up to get into any of our many many Twitter accounts you'll notice I've created these snippets with a lot of these pop-up options so that way I can have a single snippet that then gives me multiple options so that's good so that's just types of things you can make into snippets more groups that help you are the accent words that is another group that actually we offer in public groups and you can get for free so like creme lay so they will put in

6:17 the accent marks that you like me may not have even known where on that word that way you look like you know what you're doing then there's emoji groups so if you want to expand an emoji which I can never actually remember what the emoji are so instead I will use these search : thumbs up so we've got all these emoji that you can join emoji groups that you can join you'll notice I just did a search so I'll get to that later but that is very handy that is actually my number two tip that you need to use text expander is being able to search quickly on all of your sin bits because actually

7:05 as you see over in the Texas pandered window I currently have 6000 snippets so of course I don't remember any of their actual radiations except for the ones I used most so searching very important I will stress that later accented words email addresses it's amazing how often I have to expand my own email address even with autofill on in Safari you've been with one password just typing in your email addresses the thing that comes up a lot so any of these little things they can help save you time I highly recommend making those in this snippet so other than sort of very small quick things to save you a little bit of time

7:51 and especially searching through special panels and finding special characters like emoji those make really good sort of short snippets something else to think of is sort of medium sized things so like the paragraph that I expanded for the email let me clear this out again something that's a little bit more of a framework so I don't know if any of you are familiar with HTML or CSS or something like that but then you can create its snippets to represent both the syntax that you're using so that way it's complete so you don't forget anything so here is just header tags and you'll notice something neat happens actually the cursor jumped in right

8:38 between these tags so I can start typing immediately that's one of the many macros that we support so we support a whole range of sort of advanced features called macros and she lets take look at that snippet so you'll see we have the tags here and then in between there's this little percent pipe that is actually a pipe symbol but you don't need to remember that because to enter any macro you just come up here to the editing bar and you will click on the position cursor here and that will just immediately put this little macro in place where your cursor is so that way

9:24 you don't have to remember this but you get the benefit of using it so if we want to go a little bit larger I also have a whole setup for a table so taking this first idea and then expanding it now I have everything I need as a framework which is really handy so I also have one for a meeting so this is my agenda layout for whenever I meet with Mike for our sales meeting and you notice that it has the current dates spot for the agenda and then also a whole series of these optional sections

10:11 so these are another type of fill-in field so I can just turn on and off everything that I want to talk about in that meeting and then I expand it and we can start filling it in so let's take a look at that one so you'll note that I have made this a formatted text and pictures snippet so many times I'll just use plain text plain text if it's mean that whenever I expand it whatever format and font is in the place I'm expanding so let's say I'm writing an email whatever I expand will just blend into that email so everything's

10:56 Helvetica I don't have to worry about it but if I want to have something bold oh I just realized this is a plain text field so let me do that again so you can appreciate the formatting there now we have pretty formatting that I made it sorry about that right so formatted text pictures just like we just saw actually keep any of the formatting that you make them with so you can have bold you can have different colors you can also have images and links and so you just select

11:41 anything any word and then you can click on the URL linking and button and then you can paste in any URL you want and then that word becomes a link you can also drop in any images just click on the image button and then you can search for any images on your desktop and drop those in remember that you will need to change the size of the image to be whatever pixel size you want it to be before you put it into the snippet because this is not an image editor going to get rid of that because that doesn't really belong here this is a good spot to look at dates also so these

12:31 dates you'll notice don't look anything like the date that expanded over here that's because these are yet another set of macros and so to add a date let's say we wanted this day to be two days in the future so first of all if we come to our calendar button so this is where we can add the different pieces of date so we'll see that I've already added this is July so let me just redo that so to add the month of July fully written out I would just click on this and then that enters the little macro you will need to include all of your own formatting so I want to space there so I have to add

13:16 that space but now if I wanted this to be too in the future I come to this little calculator button and then I can click ad days and we get this little chunk here you'll notice that says plus one so if I wanted to wanted it to be two days I could just make that a two and then what I would get is two days in the future and really helpful when working on some of these trickier things we have a preview button up here so you can actually click on this and you get a preview of what the expanded snippet will look like and so we can see here that it is now two days in the future right so we had that series of optional

14:02 sections so these are down here and let's say we wanted to add another one so I'm going to come down here and say this is going to be the next thing so I'm going to copy this and actually cut it since that's not the ultimate text we want then I'm going to come up here to the fill-ins button and click on optional section and that adds the optional section for me and here is where the content goes and so I'm going

14:47 to paste in what I just copied and so now we have a new list so let's try that again there we go so now we have our third optional section edit so each field does get a name in this case I remove the names because the contents so short I can see it just like it is all right so that's a little bit about fill-ins but we're talking about other types of snippets and so we saw some sort of medium sized chunks of snippets and that each of those things is to help you from

15:33 having to say look up a piece of information frequently you'll have to expand something or write something out and you know what it is but you can't fully remember it so then you go searching through old documents and all emails to find it stick it in text expander you can search very quickly in the field and you'll get it finally there's sort of larger items and boilerplate frameworks that you can do so let's take a look at one of those it's a bit more advanced so here we have a nice long thing with long email with lots of different fields in it so you

16:19 can actually tab through these fields so you don't actually have to use the cursor at all so I'm going to say I'm talking to fall again so if I hit the tab key that takes me to the very next pop-up in line and I can use the arrow buttons to arrow down if I hit return then that will select I can tab and I can expand a snippet that I've already set up for being two days in the future so you can also expand snippets inside of these little fill in fields as you're expanding the original snippet a lot of expanding inside of expanding and you'll note that I've set up a time so I can switch choose between these two times

17:05 here and tapping tabbing filling in and now we come to another use of the optional section so you'll notice I can first I can option tab to get to this little checkbox and then I can use the spacebar to turn it on or off so this field will expand with a snippet when it's on like this and if I turn it off then the entire section will not show up in the expanded snippet you'll notice the interesting thing is that I have included an optional section inside of another optional section so that means if you need to get a bit more complicated maybe you have sort of a logic tree of okay I need to if this then these options if that those options

17:51 need to appear in the snippet well with optional sections since you can nest them inside each other then you can do that also in this specific case this optional section is not meant to be expanded ever you'll notice that I put note and this is basically a note to anyone who's expanding the snippet on how they should expand it and so that's just another way to try to describe in a long complicated snippet how to use it and how to use certain parts of it to yourself or to an a team that you might be sharing with and so I'm going to keep tabbing through here and finally you notice that this field is filled out with Bob but we filled in Bob at the top

18:39 that's because both of these fields have the exact same field name and that means they're treated as the same field so that way you can fill out the same information in multiple spots very quickly okay so having said all of that we can now expand our snippets everything's filled out and customized which is great you'll notice one other thing that I was able to expand this in the subject line and then it tabbed itself down into the email body so let's take a look at how to do that alright looking over here at our snippet in a snippet window you'll notice this little macro again macros are surrounded

19:26 by % so that's how you recognize it and this is a press of the tab key so you can access this a little keyboard button by clicking on tab and then that enters this macro into your snippet that means whenever you would physically have to press the tab key to get from one field to the other that's what that's representing in your snippet and so we have our tab key we have our single line fill in which is the first name which you would access through fill ins single line we had our little pop-up down here this is the days of the week and so to enter a fill-in of that type you just put in pop-up menu and then you get all of your little pop-ups and it comes with a little field

20:12 like this to allow you to fill it in more quickly so let's say I wanted to add another day I could add Saturday and ok and now we have updated our snippet and finally yet another thing you may notice is that we go thanks for our time remember this single line fill-in has the exact same name top name as the top single line fill-in so that way these are exactly the same so they can fill out at the same time and down here we have a nested snippet so I said we could nest the optional macros inside of other optional macros well you can also nest snippets inside of other snippets so if we look at the expanded content this is

20:59 what's in the snippet but this is what actually showed up so I have created a snippet for my email signature and it is the little sync PR and instead of just pasting the content into this snippet I can now reference it in this sig signature snippet what that lets me do is set up multiple different snippets for different emails I'm doing so maybe I have 10 different emails that I've set up as their own snippets if I wanted to update any piece of this signature which is fairly long and complex I only have to do it once and then every one of those 10 other email snippets that I have is then updated because it's just

21:45 referencing this one snippet so that can be really handy in saving us all the time all right keep in mind that when we are using fill-in field so a percent and both also a colon are special characters so that means you should not have any colons inside of any of your pop-ups or optional fields it also means that if you want a % to expand like as in 50% you will need to double up the % so that way it expands correctly so let us talk about how you should set up your app so

22:30 we mentioned already that you can add plenty of groups for free at our website so you can make sure to flush out the types of snippets that you have also make sure to remember how to search your snippets so there's a little menu bar item up here if you click on that you'll be able to search you can also navigate to any of your snippets and then click and they will expand there are also hotkeys that you can set up and that is the command slash on Mac so that's what I showed you earlier command slash and then every possible snippet meshing whatever you can remember will appear so that searches in the abbreviation the label or the

23:16 content so you can open up preferences hotkeys and then you can set up any of these I really like the create new snippet from clipboard that means you copy something hit this hotkey and you can immediately start creating a snippet right well it's at the top of your mind while you're thinking about it and inline search is set up by default command slash on Mac command control slash of Windows very important alright so I see that we are getting near the end of our time so I'm gonna wrap this up I'm curious if you have any questions so I'd like to get into the QA section and see if there's anything you'd like us to clarify ok my

24:04 uh can you still hear me yep I can hear you ok so I actually have been going through the questions here and responding to some folks so how do I add a snippet to a particular folder how do I add subheadings within a folder like your autocorrect folder that is one question I have and I apologize I've been answering questions so I'm not sure if you answered that already let me know if you did all right I'm not sure but it's whatever you find it super interesting let's answer it out loud so everybody can hear okay did you go through how do you set pop-ups for a snippet yes so instead of pop up you would simply click on fill in

24:50 and then pop up menu and then you get the little menu to customize everything we we did have a couple of questions on how you launch the search bar so quickly and I believe that it's set up in preferences did you walk people through preference I and I actually I've just been answering questions so I apologize I was listening but close yes so this search hotkey is set up by default command slash okay and then table formats for applications like Microsoft Word where you want a style applied now I think that might be a little bit more advanced I don't know if you want to go through table creation or just creating a table we may actually I think some of this we may want to wait for another webinar so I think I'm gonna stop talking have you allowed other people to

25:37 talk or ask questions how are we going to do this is that it question it is kind of open to you how do you want to take questions from the audience this is how we're doing we just want to read what you guys are typing in and then we can respond to you out loud okay I'm going to go towards the bottom is there any way to get preview on Windows version not currently that is a feature that we are working on still I also have a question for do you have a system for abbreviations to help you remember and actually we do

26:25 okay all right do you want to go through and read the questions and answer rather than read it go back and forth through it so let me get through the good abbreviations for second so yes you don't want aggravation to be typed by accident and so it should be something that's not a piece of a word we like to go with prefixes for abbreviations so maybe doubling up the first letter such as e email for all of the URLs I like to start with slash or even double slash depending on what group it's in also when you're grouping your snippets you want to sort of look at them as unique topics so everything that is a URL isn't a single group everything that our

27:11 support team shares is a single group so that lets you get a more descriptive prefixes so for example this su P download so a support snippet would start with su P period and then it would end with something topical to the content of that snippet so this is like su P period download is an example of it snippet explaining how you would download something and so think of in terms of prefixes okay so my I've been going through some of these questions I think some of these questions just to let the audience know will probably be subject for another webinar but one great one one great question is this has given me many great ideas but I'll need to refer to some documentation to really learn how to do this where is the

27:57 documentation on these advanced uses excellent question so yes head over to our website that is textexpander comm and we actually have a whole support section and that has our knowledgebase tips videos and so you can access all of our interesting information that you need to get started on our website here we need to stay connected to the webinar to get access to the video afterwards or will be meet email to all attendees Maya will all be getting a copy of the link of this video after the webinar ok tell

28:49 Maya hey there a date selection via a calendar selection pop-up I know there is not but that is a popular request so good to hear that that is has come up this is this is can you show how you place another snippet in the optional field snippet how to nest the optionals inside of each other yeah yeah okay okay

29:35 okay let me clear this out so because of the the pop-ups are really made to be sort of accessible to beginner users so doing something like that is a bit more advanced so in order to do that I'm going to need to copy and paste from a document and then back ends so let's say I have an optional section content alrighty

30:25 all right so now I'm going to actually cut this that's command cut and paste it over here and so what I want isn't optional inside of this so I have to break this up and then I want to get another optional actually this is an optional so I'm going to copy this and now I can paste it inside so now I have two of these inside of each other and if I want to just change the content remember no colons inside so now I have

31:13 an optional inside of an optional and I can paste that back into my snippet and if we expand it here we have our second optional inside of an optional so there we go somebody asked my I don't know you let me know if you're about ready just at what version of text expander you're using I am using version six so that is the version that is in includes the Mac App the Windows app in the iOS app if your icon looks like this it's orange

32:01 and it has a little T symbol that is the version six so I know some of you are using version five or possibly version four if you'd like to test out the new version and its features think you can come to a website and just sign up for a demo account and you can test it out for a little while if you decide you don't like it you can just go back to version five if you're not gonna lose any snippets or anything we have a question on whether this works with Windows 10 and so yes it does and I'll also mention too that it is our intent to have a webinar on Windows specifically doing this in Windows as well and then my question to you to add

32:46 an image to add an image do I need to have the files on the desktop I'm sorry about my mistake they just need to be anywhere on your hard drive they don't have to be on your desktop you know I do appreciate all the questions here I have a couple of questions or comments that says it seems somewhat advanced we're more than happy and I believe that my I set up a survey after this we're more than happy to do another webinar and and start to develop it specifically for what everyone needs the response of this has been great and we do appreciate everyone's time I think that's a lot of the questions and I do think there's

33:32 probably a lot of questions that my UI will go through and respond hopefully to people this is our first time doing the webinar with GoToMeeting we're very happy with a go to meeting but I think that we'll probably get better at this as well so I apologize for any missteps or any sort of missed starts so we do appreciate everyone's time Maya do you have anything else that you want to add and close just that this is the start of a whole series of webinars on various topics and we'll certainly be doing ones that are more beginner and ones that are more topical and so just keep an eye out for us in the future we will be responding to any of the questions that you pose in our survey at the end which

34:18 I hope you fill out please we would love to hear what you want to learn more about and that way we can give you what you want all right I think thank you very much everybody and have a great morning yeah yeah and I think I will I think we'll try to go through and maybe answer questions or I don't know necessarily how we can email them to people but we'll try to follow up if you guys do have any questions my email directly is just Mike mi ke at smile software calm please feel free to email me your questions and I will make sure that either I respond to them or find the right person can't smile to

35:05 take care of that for you Mike at smile software comm and that's it for today so thank you everybody