TextExpander Best Practices: 7 Customer Success Secrets

With TextExpander, there are no rules. You have total freedom to create, organize, and name your Snippets however you want. However, we’ve built up a lot of “best practices” over the years—little tricks that make using TextExpander more enjoyable and efficient.

With TextExpander—or any productivity tool—customers often ask us if they’re using it “right.” How should Snippets be named? What abbreviations should you use? Should you use a prefix or a suffix for the abbreviation to prevent accidental expansion? The truth is, we often have the same questions ourselves.

Rex Mann, one of our Customer Success Managers here at TextExpander, is a walking encyclopedia of these best practices based on his years of experience in psychology and productivity consulting. His knowledge has only been available through our regular TextExpander webinars, but we decided that these tips need to be written down!

TextExpander Definitions

TextExpander is a typing shortcut tool that helps you write faster. You can save any type of text into TextExpander: words, phrases, paragraphs, codes, URLs, emails, and even entire book chapters.

For each text fragment you save, which we call a Snippet, you assign it a keyboard shortcut or abbreviation. From then on, whenever you want to insert the saved text, all you have to do is type the abbreviation.

For instance, you can create a Snippet so when you type txp it expands into “TextExpander.”

Let’s define a few terms upfront. There are three key components of a Snippet:

• Label: This is simply the name of the Snippet you see in TextExpander and in inline search.
• Abbreviation: This is the string of characters you type to trigger Snippet expansion. In the example above, txp is the abbreviation.
• Content: What the Snippet expands into. In the example above, the Content is “TextExpander”.

That’s a simple example. TextExpander can do so much more. You can create Snippets with fill-ins, optional sections, and other customization options. It can help you fill out long forms. To get a sense of everything you can do with TextExpander, check out our TextExpander 101 webinar.

Now that we’ve nailed down those basic definitions, let’s see Rex’s tips.

1. Keep related Snippets organized into groups

Organization is a cornerstone of TextExpander best practices. Many TextExpander users have built up collections of hundreds—or even thousands—of Snippets over the years, and without a good system in place, it’s all too easy to forget what Snippets you have. Organization makes your Snippets accessible, which also makes them maintainable.

Take advantage of Snippet Groups to organize related Snippets. It keeps your Snippets organized and offers other advantages:

• It keeps your Snippets in shorter, easily scannable lists.
• It helps you take advantage of Snippet Group abbreviation prefixes to make it easy to create abbreviation patterns for related Snippets.
• It makes them easier to share since you share a Snippet Group instead of an individual Snippet.
• Other than sharing, there are two important settings only available to Groups and not individual Snippets:
  
  • Expand In: This lets you specify which applications the Snippet will expand or not expand in. For instance, you may have a Snippet group of frequently visited URLs that you only want to expand in web browsers.
  • Expand When: By default, Snippets only expand when following whitespace. However, there can often be times when you want a Snippet to expand after a character, like a colon or period.

It’s a best practice to make copious use of Groups. When in doubt about where to store a Snippet, create a new Group for it! It’s perfectly okay to have a Snippet Group with only one Snippet. In time, you’ll likely come up with more Snippets that fit in that Group, so this saves you from having to find and aggregate them at a later date.

More Snippet Groups mean more options.

This video teaches you how to create Snippet Groups:

2. Snippet Group prefix best practices

The second cornerstone of TextExpander best practices—after organization—is making Snippets memorable and discoverable.

Back in the day, many of us would try to make Snippet abbreviations as short as possible, usually with an obscure prefix to prevent accidental triggering. For instance, you might set a Snippet so ;yt expands into “YouTube.” That’s fine for expanding short words and phrases—as long as you use a system that makes sense to you—but we’ve learned over the years that longer, more descriptive Snippet abbreviations are more likely to be used.

For longer Snippets, like email templates, it’s worth typing a few extra characters for the abbreviation in exchange for making the Snippet more memorable and user-friendly.

A key feature for creating memorable Snippet abbreviations is Snippet Group abbreviation prefixes.

What is a Snippet Group prefix? It’s a set of characters applied to the shortcut of every Snippet in a group. Here’s an example:

• Say you have a Snippet with the abbreviation of thanks that expands into a two-paragraph “thank you” email.
• Since the Snippet is intended to be used in email, you put it in a Group called Email.
• You make the Group prefix em. to signify email. Note the period.
• To expand the Snippet, you would type em.thanks instead of just “thanks.”

Of course, thanks by itself isn’t an ideal Snippet abbreviation, because it expands every time you simply want to type “thanks.” The beauty of Snippet Group prefixes is that you can make your Snippet abbreviations easy to remember, like “thanks,” and make them unique and hard to accidentally trigger by applying a Group prefix. You won’t accidentally type em.thanks.

Note that if you move that thanks Snippet to another Group, it would no longer expand by typing em.thanks but would adopt the prefix of the new Group. If you move it to a Group with no prefix, it would expand when you type “thanks.” If you move it to a group with a prefix of cal. it expands when you type cal.thanks.

Let’s expand on another way to make Snippet abbreviations memorable.

3. Group name and prefix best practices

Another of our best practices is to make your Snippet Labels and Snippet Group prefixes relate to each other.

Examples:

• A group called “Calendar” with a group prefix of cal.
• A group called “Email” with a group prefix of em.
• A group called “Support” with a group prefix of sup.

For the abbreviation, simply use a short form of the Group name followed by a period.

With this method, not only are your Snippets grouped together, they have consistent abbreviations, and they’re easy to remember.

Plus, this makes it easier to take advantage of inline search. If you have several Snippets in a group called Support, type sup. in an inline search to reveal them all.

4. Take advantage of inline search

TextExpander systemwide inline search helps you quickly access Snippets without memorizing their abbreviations. The default shortcuts on each platform:

• macOS: Command + /
• Windows: Control + /
• Chrome: Control + Period

You can change these shortcuts in TextExpander preferences.

Type in your Snippet name or abbreviation and press Return or Enter to trigger it. And if you name your Snippets according to these best practices, they’re always easy to find!

Here’s a video showing how to use inline search:

5. Split up and nest Snippets

Did you know that you can embed or “nest” one Snippet in another? This makes Snippets modular, easier to maintain and may highlight other efficiencies for your TextExpander workflow. It’s another of our best practices.

Our video on Fill-ins shows examples of nesting Snippets:

A common use of TextExpander is creating email signatures. Typically, an email signature has information like:

• Your name
• Your title
• Your email address
• Your phone number

And looks something like this:

Jane Doe
jane.doe@textexpander.com
TextExpander Wizard
--
Unlock your productivity. TextExpander keeps teams communicating consistently and accurately.
Learn more at TextExpander.com
Join our TextExpander Webinars! https://textexpander.com/webinar/

But what if Jane gets a promotion to TextExpander Wizard Supervisor? She’ll have to manually edit that Snippet along with any other Snippets that have her title. The same problem occurs if she changes her name, email address, or phone number.

We recommend that every TextExpander user have a Group called My Information with these Snippets:

• myphone
• mytitle
• myname
• myemail

Use the Group Prefix my without a dot. Each Snippet is self-explanatory: myphone is your phone number, myname is your full name, etc.

Then, create an email signature Snippet with those personal Snippets embedded where you want them.

Now, if any of those bits of information change, you can update them in one central place.

A related trick: give important Snippets a descriptive abbreviation, like myphone or em.expensebody, so they’re easy to find with inline search and easy to recognize when they’re nested in another Snippet. Then create a second Snippet with a short abbreviation, like ;mp, that simply nests the first one. You type the short version every day, and when you update the original, the short one updates too. Just avoid abbreviations that are longer than the text they expand into.

You can use this trick to standardize email signatures across your organization. If everyone in the organization sets up those basic Snippets, you can share a standardized email signature Snippet. Because no personal information is embedded, it simply pulls in each team member’s personal Snippets.

6. Find Snippets worth creating, and test them before you share

Many new users install TextExpander and then can’t think of a first Snippet. Others create Snippets they expect to need and never use them. The fix for both is to start from the work you already repeat.

Map the tasks you repeat

Spend a couple of days noticing what you do over and over. When a task repeats, stop and write down the steps: what you type, which keys you press, and where you reach for the mouse. That outline, a simple form of process mapping, shows you which parts a Snippet can take over. TextExpander’s Suggested Snippets feature can also flag phrases you type often.

Snippets can do more than type text. They can press keys like Tab, Enter, Return, Esc, and the arrow keys, so one Snippet can move through a form or an email for you.

Say you email your manager an expense report every month. In Gmail, that means typing the address, pressing Tab to reach the subject line, typing the subject, pressing Tab to reach the body, and writing the message. Save the address, subject, and body as their own Snippets, then build one Snippet that nests all three with a Tab key between them. One abbreviation now fills in the whole email.

Test a Snippet before you share it

Use a new Snippet in your own work for about a week before you share it with your team. Check that:

• It does what you intended, with no rough edges, in every app where you’ll use it.
• The abbreviation and any Fill-in labels make sense to someone who didn’t write them.
• Teammates can type the abbreviation easily, or find the Snippet quickly with inline search.

A week of testing catches problems before a shared Snippet sends the wrong text to a customer.

7. Document shared Snippets so anyone can use them

Ask a programmer what makes code easy to maintain, and they’ll mention clear names and good comments. Snippets work the same way. The clear labels and readable abbreviations from the tips above do most of the work. These four habits cover the rest, especially for shared Snippets.

Put short instructions in labels

If a Snippet needs a heads-up, add it to the label. For a Snippet that pastes your clipboard as plain text, a label like “Paste Plain Text (Clipboard)” tells everyone what it will insert. On shared Snippets, some teams also add the creator’s initials and the date.

Fill in each shared group’s Notes

Every Snippet Group has a Notes field. On shared groups, add:

• What the Snippets are for
• Created by
• Updated by
• Reviewed by
• Date last updated

Teammates can see how fresh the group is and who to ask when something breaks. A group nobody has touched in a couple of years is a good candidate for review.

Write Fill-in field names as questions

Name each Fill-in field for what the person should enter. “What is the prospect’s phone number?” is clearer than “Phone.” Our sales team uses a call-notes Snippet whose field names work as a checklist: the prospect’s company, their cell number, why they reached out, and any concerns to address.

Add instructions with an empty Optional section

For Snippets that need more explanation, add an Optional section, type the instructions as its name, and leave its content empty. When the Snippet expands, the instructions appear in the Fill-in window, and the checkbox does nothing because the section is empty. Use this sparingly, since it makes the Fill-in window appear even for a Snippet that wouldn’t otherwise need it.

How to organize Snippet Groups and permissions for a large team

For a large team, organize shared Snippet Groups by team or workflow, give each group a clear prefix and one owner, and set permissions so most people can expand Snippets while only owners can edit them. Share company-wide groups with Everyone so new hires get them automatically.

Structure groups around how people work

• Company-wide groups: product names, links, and standard disclaimers, shared with Everyone in the organization and given a prefix like co.
• Team groups: one group per team or workflow, such as Support with sup. or Sales with sls., shared with that team.
• Personal groups: each person’s My Information group stays personal, so shared templates can nest those details without exposing them.

Set permissions by role

Role	Permission	Why
Most team members	Can expand	Everyone sends the same approved wording, and only owners change it
Subject experts	Can edit	The people closest to the content keep it accurate
Group owner or team lead	Can manage	One person controls who has access and the group’s settings
Organization admins	Admin of every Organization Snippet Group by default	Someone can always step in when an owner leaves

Keep the library maintainable

Give every shared group a named owner and a review date in its Group Notes, and use Expand In to keep groups like browser-only URLs from expanding in the wrong apps. When a team grows past a handful of people, the Business plan adds unlimited team members and Snippet Requests. See how TextExpander for business supports shared libraries, or download TextExpander to set up your first shared group.

We hope these tips have given you some insight into better ways to use TextExpander. And if you don’t use TextExpander, has it whetted your appetite for learning more? Try TextExpander yourself with a free account and discover what TextExpander can do for you and your team. When you’re ready, contact our sales team to supercharge your productivity. Paid plans start at $5 per user per month, billed annually.