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Getting Started: TextExpander 101 (Webinar)

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The first of the TextExpander Getting Started series, “TextExpander 101” is for every person new to TextExpander. Learn all the TextExpander basics in this hour long webinar. Topics include:

  • Creating key Snippets of text which expand with a simple abbreviation
  • Saving yourself from typos and errors
  • Reclaiming time spent on redundancies
  • Automating your email messages
  • Developing and organizing your information into Snippet groups

Transcript:

Hi. Thank you for joining us for today’s TextExpander webinar, getting started With TextExpander 101. My name is Jennifer Burnett, and I am with the customer success team. This is Rex. He is our co-host for today. Can you say hi to everyone, Rex?

Hello, everyone. Welcome.

All right. Perfect. We’re both on the customer success team. And so we are so thankful that you were able to take time away from your busy schedule and join us today.

So this webinar is perfect for those of you who are just getting started with TextExpander, or maybe you’re on the bubble about signing up to use TextExpander. Maybe you are someone who’s used TextExpander in the past, and you just need a refresher or you want to learn something new. I do encourage you if you are a current TextExpander user to open up your TextExpander app and follow along.

So feel free to open up your TextExpander desktop app follow along with us if you wanna open up a blank email or Notepad or something like that, that you can expand Snippets in, you can absolutely do that as well. So we’ll go ahead and get started here.

First of all, I wanna talk about how we can support you. We have a ton of TextExpander resources. If you ever have any questions, need technical assistance, or would like to learn more, you can always head over to our learning center or just reach out to our support team as well.

And if you’re interested in seeing how other TextExpander users use TextExpander, and would like to look at some of their content, you can explore our Public Groups. We’ll actually dive into Public Groups a little bit later on in our webinar. But Public Groups is a wonderful resource for you to have. All right.

So this TextExpander 101 webinar will really cover the basics and give you a good sense of what TextExpander is and how you can begin using it to save you more time and to quickly access the information you need when you need it.

If you’re brand new to TextExpander, this is the place to be.

If you’ve been using TextExpander for a while, don’t worry, there is always something new to learn. I try to drop extra nuggets in for you. And of course, if you have questions we’re happy to answer those as well.

So today we’re gonna explore the TextExpander features that we call fill ins and keyboard macros. And we’re gonna look at Snippet Organization and TextExpander preferences. And if there’s anything else that you were looking to learn here in particular, please drop it into the questions room and Rex will let me know about that.

So what is TextExpander? TextExpander is a knowledge activation tool that uses Snippets to quickly allow you to store, share and retrieve information.

Snippets are the longer repetitive texts that we pair with that abbreviation to then type in its place.

I want you to think of TextExpander as copy and paste on steroids, instead of having to search through and copy from old emails or notes or repository of where you keep things that use over and over again, you’ll just type an abbreviation and expand a Snippet instead.

TextExpander is a great fit for everyone. Whether you’re writing out support responses to customers, you’re sending messages out to recruit and entice new prospects, or even if you’re using it for your personal daily tasks, TextExpander makes those messages more fast and consistent.

So why would you wanna use TextExpander?
Or why did you sign up? Why are you looking to sign up?

Simply put, TextExpander is going to save you time and it’s going to increase your efficiency.

On your screen, you can see we have a set of statistics and you can see that this team of 45 people were actually able to save almost 200 hours in 30 days. So based off of a 40-hour work week, TextExpander was able to save this team approximately five employees worth of hours. Again, that’s based on a 40-hour work week.

What would you do with all that time? I can tell you that I would love to take a nap with that extra time that I have. I’m a mama too and too. So maybe you can get a nap. All right.

So TextExpander is an ecosystem that includes the TextExpander desktop app, and also the web app. TextExpander is an app that you do have to install. We have an app available for Mac users, Window users, and then we also have it available for iPad and iPhone. And there is also an extension in the Google Chrome browser for anyone who might be on a Chromebook or using Linux as well.

The desktop app is actually where you’re going to create and edit your Snippets. And that’s where we’re gonna work largely today during our webinar. So again, if you already have TextExpander installed, I do encourage you to open it and follow along inside of the app. If not, no worries. This recording will be sent to you. You can always re-watch it back after you download the app and follow through as if you were watching a live webinar. So now that we have some background on TextExpander, let’s actually explore more of TextExpander.

The first thing I’m gonna do though, is get out of that presentation. And now on your screen, you should be able to see a blank email on the left and then my TextExpander desktop app on the right. If you’re not able to see that, definitely let Rex know in the questions room. I do wanna point out that I am on a Windows PC computer. So my desktop app might look a little bit different than yours.

If you are on a Mac computer, really important to point that out. Feel free to open up your app and follow along.

And in today’s webinar, we’re actually gonna create an email that’s going to allow us to easily follow up with folks after an event.

We’re gonna pretend that we went to a virtual conference and we’re following up with folks from that conference.

So emails are one of the most commonly used methods of communication. And when done correctly, you can save a lot of time, especially by using TextExpander. So we’ve figured today that we would actually show you how you can create emails more efficiently. I know I’ve trained a lot of people who said that they were just using TextExpander for short sentences or little notes that they were adding into their CRM and different things like that. And they never thought about using TextExpander to create emails. We definitely wanna spend time on that today. But first I’m going to turn my web camera off to give more precedents to the TextExpander desktop app and that blank email there.

So I’m gonna go ahead and turn my camera off. Rex, free to turn yours off if you’d like to as well. All right. Perfect. Rex, well, you’ll let me know if anyone says they can’t see anything but so far, I think we’re good to go. So let’s go ahead and let’s just dive right on in.

We’ve already talked about what TextExpander is and what Snippets are. And you’ve heard me say Snippets a couple of times by now. So let me actually show you what a Snippet looks like.

One of the most commonly used Snippets or created Snippets is gonna be a Snippet for your email. If you have not created a Snippet yet, I highly encourage you to create your first Snippet for your email. If you’re like me, you have multiple emails. I have emails for business, I have personal emails. I have an email as part of my HOA. So I have a special HOA email. So I have tons of Snippets for my emails. So let me actually just show you one that I use all the time.

And very quickly, I was able to type in an abbreviation, which remember is that short code or text that expands my Snippet for me.

And it populated my training email, which is of the other emails that I use. So this Jennifertraining@textexpander.com. I was able to populate that very quickly just by typing in xxem, which is my abbreviation.

So this is an example of a Snippet.

Snippets can be expanded everywhere that you type such as in your web browser, Google Docs, Sheets, and of course emails as we just demonstrated here.

Again, what we talked about today is we’re going to use TextExpander to create an email to follow up with some folks that we met at a conference. So I actually wanna give you a little sneak peek of the email we’re going to create together today. And I’m gonna show you that now.

So I’m gonna type in an abbreviation here, but you’ll notice something different happen. When I typed that abbreviation in, instead of my Snippet just boom expanding like my email Snippet did, this Snippet brought up a temporary window and you can see that temporary window is here on the left side of your screen.

This temporary window came up because TextExpander is prompting me to enter in different fill ins that I’ve created this Snippet with. And so we are going to create these fill in the blank areas together today using TextExpander fill ins. So this is what we’ll focus on creating today, but let me just fully expand this for you so you can see how that’ll expand.

And you can see it very quickly, I was able to expand a Snippet for an email that I can send off to multiple people over and over and over again. So that is what we will create together today. Let me go ahead and erase this so we have a blank canvas to work with, and let’s actually go ahead and take a quick little tour of the TextExpander desktop app before we create our first Snippet.

So again, please feel free to follow along in your own desktop app, but I’m gonna pop over here to the right side of my screen and inside of the TextExpander desktop app, you’ll notice on the left hand side, we have our very first vertical, our very first panes.

So TextExpander has three different panes available in the desktop app. The far left pane is your group’s pane.

This is where all of your Snippets are actually organized in their groups. Snippet groups allow us to organize our Snippets to best fit our workflow. You can have as many Snippet Groups as you need, and I do encourage you to make them as granular and specific as necessary.

For example, you can see here that I actually have a recruiting CRM Snippet Group. These are Snippets that I use only in my CRM for my recruiting job. I also have one for onboarding, HR information.

So you can see I’ve gone very granular with things like that recruiting emails. So there are four different types of Snippet Groups.

Let’s talk about those.

Your very first top set or type of Snippet Groups are your personal Snippet Groups. They’re at the very top there on the left pane. And these are Snippets and Snippet Groups that you’ve created and you are the owner. You’re the admin of these. These are your personal Snippet Groups. And so these are just yours. No one else has access to these.

Your next set of Snippet Groups are your shared Snippet Groups. These are Snippet Groups that you have created and shared with someone to use that Snippet Group that you’ve created. You are still the admin or the manager of those Snippet Groups. They’re still your personal Snippet Groups. You can also have Snippet Groups that show up in the shared section here that have been shared with you by someone else. But remember, they still own those Snippet Groups. Those are their personal Snippet Groups.

Your third set of Snippet Groups here are your Organization Snippet Groups. Now Organization Snippets are owned by your organization, your TextExpander organization that you belong to. So sharing Snippet Groups with your organization makes it easier for your team, your organization to view statistics. It allows you to share Snippets with the correct team and to ensure that everyone has access to the information that they need and that it would be directly at their fingertips.

The last set of Snippet Groups here are those Public Snippet Groups that I mentioned at the beginning of our training time.

Public Snippet Groups are Snippet Groups that other everyday TextExpander users have created, and they have shared to our Public Groups page. They’re a great way to build out your Snippet library.

So there are Public Groups for autocorrect, date and time groups, templates for support teams. There’s literally hundreds of different Public Groups out there. There’s even Public Groups for “Star Trek” quotes, which I think Rex really enjoys, or was it “Star Wars?” I can’t remember. I’m not a huge fan. Sorry if I offended anyone, but there are tons of different Public Groups out there.

And we do encourage you to take a look at the different Public Groups that are available to you and maybe bookmark those, so you can look at those after the webinar.

In the newest version of TextExpander, you can click this little plus, add Public Group button there to see what Public Groups are available to you in an older version of TextExpander, that little plus signs in the bottom left hand corner of your TextExpander desktop app.

One thing I do wanna note about Public Groups is that they are managed by the author, the person who created that Public Group is still the manager and author of those. So you are not able to make any edits or updates to those Snippets. However, you can receive live updates whenever that author does make changes.

And if for some reason you really did want to make some edits, you can very easily go into one of those Snippet and you can right click on that Snippet and copy that Snippet over or duplicate that Snippet or even do the same thing with the Snippet Group.

You can duplicate that Snippet Group and then you’ll have a duplicated copy of the Snippet or the Snippet Group that will move up to your personal Snippet. So that is one thing that you can do with Public Snippet Groups. All right.

So let’s go ahead and since we’re inside of TextExpander now, and we’re talking about groups, let’s go ahead and begin by creating a group for ourselves.

So you’ll need to create a group that your Snippets will belong to. I already have a couple of personal Snippet Groups created, but let’s go ahead and create one together.

So we’ll go ahead and create a new group by clicking that new group button up here. And you’ll notice a new group default section or group setting appears here for us where we can actually name this Snippet Group. So let’s go ahead and we’re gonna call this.

I’m gonna do a lot of copy and pasting from my other screen, just to save you and me the grief of having to watch me, but I’m gonna call this group TextExpander webinar.

This’ll be my TextExpander webinar group. You’ll notice there’s some preferences here. We’re gonna skip over those for now, but we’ll talk about those a little bit later, but my group now is showing up over here in my personal Snippet Groups.

So if I click on that personal Snippet Group, that TextExpander webinar group, now my other panes show up again.

That middle pane is where the actual Snippets that are a part of the Snippet Group will be listed out. We don’t have any here yet. That’s why it’s blank right now. This is also where I can click to add a new Snippet by clicking this new Snippet button that looks like a plus sign here.

When I click that, that will open up the third pane and this is where the actual new Snippet or the blank Snippet opens up here on the right side of my desktop app.

This is what we call the Snippet editor, because this is where you will do most of your creating and editing of your Snippets.

At the very top of the Snippet editor, you’ll notice we have what we call a content type area where you can choose what type of content your Snippet will be created or expanded in. Right now, it’s set to plain text.

Plain text Snippets are text without formatting. This type of text is going to adapt to the text where it is expanded. So it makes it perfect for those autocorrect Snippets that we were just talking about in Public Groups.

And the best example I can give you here is if you have a Word document that was created in all bold, in all italicized letters and you expanded a plain text Snippet in that Word document, that plain text Snippet would then become all bold in italicized letters, because remember it adapts to the area that it has been expanded in. So the plain text content, I have a couple other choices here as well.

We have format text and pictures and format and text and pictures allows you to customize your Snippets to include more enriched features such as hyperlinks and pictures.

You’ll also notice we do have shells script, AppleScript and JavaScript. TextExpander does support those as well, but we will not be going over those content choices today, but we do plan to have future webinars that dive a little bit more into those advanced content choices. For today, we’ll just stick with formatted text and pictures and plain text.

Beneath the content type, you’ll notice we have our Editing bar and the Editing bar is where you have those advanced options to create your Snippets. And we’re gonna go over several of those in today’s webinar.

You may have noticed as I toggle between plain text and formatted text and pictures content type, that Editing bar was a little bit smaller with plain text and a little bit larger with formatted text and pictures. And that’s the difference between the two content types. Remember formatted text and pictures allows you to include more enriched features to customize your Snippet. For now, we’ll go ahead and leave this Snippets as a plain text though.

Below our Editing bar, we have our content area. This is where you’re actually going to enter the text that you would like TextExpander to expand.

So you can either type directly into this content area, or you can copy and paste directly in here as well. Oh, and I forgot to copy that. So you can copy and paste directly in here as well, if you would like to do that, which makes it really nice because if you have a repository of information or like an ongoing frequently used document that you have been creating, or that you’ve been using for that copy and paste, and you’re using TextExpander to take over that job, you don’t have to retype that information.

You can paste direct into that content area. So that makes that super helpful. So since we’re in the content area, let’s go ahead and create this first Snippet together.

The first Snippet I wanna work on creating together is gonna be for the subject line of our email. So I’m actually gonna go ahead and paste in again, like I said, I’m going to copy and paste from my other screen directly in here.

And the subject line of my email is gonna be, “It was great meeting you today.” Very simple, very straightforward. That’s gonna be the very simple subject line of my email, and that is my full Snippet.

So that’s the Snippet that’s all I’m putting into that content area, but below the content area, we have our label field. This is where I’m going to be able to name and describe my Snippet so that… And you will be able to name and describe your Snippet so that you and others can easily find that Snippet in the future. So you wanna make sure that you use a label that describes the Snippet you are creating.

A good label is specific and descriptive.

I like for you to think about labels as being the who, what, when, where, why and how of your Snippet. So for this Snippet, let’s go ahead and call this, we’ll call this one “Conference follow up subject.” You know what? I’m gonna go ahead and so I can make this a little bit more granular.

We’re gonna make sure that we label this with an email, ’cause this is for our email. So if we’re being descriptive, let’s call this email conference follow up subject. That’s a little bit more descriptive. And that meets all those parameters that we were just talking about.

Below the label field, we have our abbreviation field. This is where you’re going to enter that short code that we’ve been discussing that’s actually going to trigger your Snippets to expand.

Your abbreviation should be short, easy to type and to remember, and it should include a prefix.

So for our abbreviation here, let’s go ahead and we’ll just use a very simple prefix of x and then we’ll type in our abbreviation of sub. So x sub will go ahead and be our abbreviation for this subject email Snippet. Now, excuse me, I apologize. So choked on my air there. So now we actually have that abbreviation created and all set and ready to go.

So let’s go ahead and expand this Snippet for us. But I do wanna point out, there are a couple things here that you may have noticed.

I did not click save at any point or time there, TextExpander is so smart that it is automatically saving for me as I enter into the content area, the label field, the abbreviation field, TextExpander is automatically saving for me.

So I really wanna make sure that you’re aware of that, there’s no save button in TextExpander.

If I wanted to preview my Snippet before expanding it, I could absolutely do that as well.

I could go up to the upper right hand corner, put that little eyeball up here and get a preview of what my Snippet will look like when I fully expand it. So it was great meeting you today.

This is a very simple Snippet, but let’s go ahead and expand it in our subject line of our email.

So I’m gonna place my cursor in the subject line of my email and to expand the Snippet, I’m gonna type in the abbreviation that I’ve created, which is x sub. And you can see very quickly, boom, that Snippet expanded into the subject line of my email. “It was great virtually meeting you today.”

And if I wanted to add a couple more exclamation marks to this, I could absolutely do that. And when I expand that Snippet again, all of that information will now be because remember it’s automatically saving for me.

So that is a very simple Snippet and we were able to create that together very quickly. So I hope that you’re able to see how quickly you can create Snippets. It’s not a time consuming process.

Let’s go ahead and now I wanna dive into that more advanced Snippet that I showed you at the beginning of our training here, and actually show you those different fill ins that are available.

So just so we have it open to work from, I’m gonna go ahead and expand this Snippet and let this temporary window sit here so we can use it as an example here on the left. So we’ll go ahead and we’ve got that temporary window open and now we’ll pop over here to our TextExpander desktop app.

And remember the first thing that we need to do is select the group where we want to create that Snippet in, which is going to be our TextExpander webinar group.

The middle pane is where our Snippets are located. Here’s that email conference, the subject line E Snippet that we created.

And we’re going to create a new Snippet by clicking that new Snippet button that remember will expand a new Snippet editor, open up a new Snippet editor for us.

And so we are going to change our content type here to formatted text and pictures. Because if you remember from when we expanded the Snippet earlier, or if you look over here at an example, we’re going to include a hyperlink and a picture inside of the Snippet. So that means we need to have that more enriched features available to us that’s a included in the formatted text and pictures content type. So let’s go ahead and start building this Snippet out. When we expanded the Snippet the first time, we were able to include the subject line of our email, and then we were able to move down to the body of our email.

The reason we were able to do that is because TextExpander has keyboard presses that are built into TextExpander that you can include in your Snippets.

So we’ll go ahead and again, I’m gonna do some copy and pasting from my other screen here, but we’ll include our subject line of our email, which was, “It was great virtually meeting you today.”

And then as if we were typing this email ourselves, we want to tab down to the body of the email. So we’ll let TextExpander to do that for us, by going to our editing bar and finding the keyboard macros dropdown, and selecting that, you can see the different keyboard presses that are available to you and we’ll select tab here.

So now we have our subject line and we have that keyboard press of tab entered in and then I’m ahead and enter in my greeting line of hello. And you’ll notice if we look at our example over here, I’m being prompted in to enter the name of the person I’m emailing. This is the first fill in that we are going to use.

This is called a single-line field fill in. So let me show you where those are located.

In your editing bar, you have a window or you have a button that looks like a little piece of paper, and if you hover over, it says fill in. That’s your fill ins that are available to you.

So we’re gonna go ahead and select the single-line field fill in.

And you’ll notice TextExpander then gives me a dialogue box here where it’s asking me to name the single-line field. So what I’m doing here is I am naming the single-line field to prompt the end user of the Snippet, to know what to enter into the single-line field.

So you can say first name, full name, last name, whatever you would like to say here, I’ll go ahead and say name because we want the person using this to say name. Actually, let’s go ahead and say first name, we’ll say first name.

You can also set a default value here if that’s something you’d like to do, perhaps you are someone who is terrible about names and you forget to type in names or put in person name or something like that, you could also just change this or you could set this as a default of there or a friend. You could try something like that. And then that single-line field will show up with a default of whatever it is that you chose to put in there. I’m gonna go ahead and leave this default blank though and just be prompted to enter in a first name.

We’ll go ahead and click okay to then insert that single-line field, and I’ll finish off that greeting line with a comma here and then we’re gonna enter down to the opening line of my email. So it was gonna be, “It was great chatting during the.” So again, I’m gonna copy and paste directly in here. It was great chatting during the.

If we look at my example on the left, you’ll notice we have what we call a popup menu here. This is another fill in we’re gonna work on creating together right now. This popup up menu is allowing me to choose different options or different places that I met this person. Did I meet them at a mixer, a virtual conference, a world conference.

So I can select the choice that I want with this popup menu. So let’s go ahead and put that into our Snippet.

We’ll do that by placing our cursor where we want that popup menu to be, and we’ll go up to our Editing bar and back to that fill ins dropdown. And I’m going to select popup menu here.

Again, TextExpander is going to give me a dialogue window where it’s asking me to name this popup menu. So we’ll just go ahead and name this conferences. And then we have our options below the name of the popup menu.

These are the options we want to include in this popup menu. So we attend a few different types of conferences. We attend world conferences, we also attend virtual conferences, and then we attend mixers as well.

So we need to add one more option here for us very simple to do that. We’re just gonna click that plus button that adds a popup option. We can remove popup options if that’s something we wanted to do as well, but let’s go ahead and put in mixer here. All right. Perfect.

And then over here on the right side of my screen there’s this popup menu dialogue window, we have default choices. So you can set one of these options to be your default choice, which means it would be the first choice that would show up when that temporary window prompting you to fill in the fill ins shows up when you’re expanding a Snippet.

So you can go ahead and select any of those to be your defaults. We’ll go ahead and stick with virtual conference because we’re still operating in COVID times.

On the left side of the options for our popup menu, I can reorganize these. I can put these in order of the things that we attend most often. So if we attend mixers most often or virtual conferences most often. I can reorganize these however I would like to.

So I have seen people extend their popup menus through all of the letters of the alphabet, all of the states in the United States. So your popup menus can be expanded really far.

And so you may wanna readjust those or reorder those. You can also, really important to note, your popup menus are not limited. The options for these are not limited to a word or a couple of words, you can have full sentences in your popup menu. So that’s really important to know as well. All right.

So let’s go ahead and click okay to insert our popup menu. So now we have, “It was great chatting during the conferences.” We’ll finish that off with a period. Our next line of our Snippet email is going to be, “I hope to connect again soon” and I’m gonna go ahead and copy that from my other screen here and paste that into my Snippet editor. All right. “So I hope to connect again soon. “To send over the literature we discussed, “please use my address below.”

So now in the example on the left, you’ll notice we have a place for our address. This is another fill in field that we’re going to use.

This is called a multi-line field. It is very similar to the single-line field in that you are prompted to entering information here. The only difference is the multi-line field is visually bigger and it allows you to include more lines of text, so multiple lines of text.

So we’ll go ahead and enter that in.

And we’ll do that by going up to our fill ins in our editing bar and we’ll select multi-line field now. Again, we’re gonna get a dialogue box where we’re prompted to name this multi-line field. And for us, this is gonna go ahead and be address.

So we’ll call this field address. You could call this home address, you could call this work address. So you know what? Let’s go ahead and call this home address. So we’ll call that multi-line field home address.

You can set a default value here as well if that’s something you’d like to do. So we’ll go ahead and actually, because our home address probably isn’t gonna change a whole bunch, we’re gonna set that default value to the 42 Wallaby Way. And so we’ll go ahead and set that fault value there.

And so now when that multi-line field shows up, when this temporary window opens, when we’re expanding our Snippet, it’ll default to our address, but we can absolutely erase that and type in an address here if it’s something that we wanted to do. Okay.

So we’ll go ahead and click okay to insert that multi-line field. So now we’ve created a couple of different fill ins here, before I move on, I do wanna point out that you can absolutely go back and edit any of these fill ins by double clicking on them.

So you can come back in and make any edits to those that you would like to do by just double clicking on those fill ins.

Let’s go ahead and move down to then final the closing line of our email here and our call to action or so, so this is where if you were asking them if they would like to schedule some time with us, here’s a link to our calendar.

So I’m gonna go ahead and just again, paste that information in, and you’ll notice this is where I’m including a hyperlink to my calendar. And so you can include your hyperlink a couple of different ways here. And the easiest way is probably, here you go, we’ll go ahead and the first thing is you do have to be in formatted text and pictures. I wanna make sure that you’re aware of that, ’cause this is one of those enrich features that’s only included in formatted text and pictures.

So in our Editing bar, we’re actually going to find the insert URL button and we’ll select that. And TextExpander will give us a dialogue window here where it’s asking us to either type or paste in the URL that we want to include as a hyperlink.

You do have the ability to set optional text here if you’d like to. I could call this my calendar, Jen’s calendar, whatever you wanted to call there would show up as the hyperlink instead of the full URL, just showing us the hyperlink. But for our purposes today, we’ll just use the URL as our hyperlink.

We’ll click okay to insert that into our Snippet editor. Now, if you were copying that hyperlink directly from somewhere where it was already included as a hyperlink, and you wanted to paste that directly into your Snippet editor here, if you’re in formatted text and pictures, TextExpander is going to recognize that as a hyperlink, but I know you’re not always gonna be able to copy that directly from somewhere where it’s already included as a hyperlink, but you do have that option available to you.

Let’s go ahead and finish off our email here with our signature.

So I’m again, going to copy and paste my signature over here and that’s going to be “Cheers, Jennifer Burnett, “customer success.” And if we look back at my example over here on the left, I’ve included a picture of my TextExpander logo. This is again where that formatted text and pictures comes into play.

And so we’ll go ahead and pop up here to our Editing bar and we’re going to choose our insert image button.

And then we’re going to be prompted to select our image from somewhere on our computer and we’ll click okay to insert that image.

Really important to note, TextExpander does not have the ability to edit your image once it has been inserted inside of these Snippet editor. So just make sure that you edit that image prior to inserting it. All right.

So now we have our Snippet fully created, we need to finish it off by applying a label. And remember your label needs to be descriptive.

So we’ll go ahead and we’re gonna call this email Snippet, email follow up with conference leads. That’s pretty descriptive, that works for us.

And then we’ll go ahead and we’ll set an abbreviation here. And so we’re gonna use x as our abbreviation, but before we move on, I want you to notice something x is what I’m using as my prefix for this abbreviation.

But you’ll notice when I started typing that abbreviation, a orange warning label showed up at the top of my Snippet editor. And then my Snippet also kind of turned to black here. And this is because TextExpander is recognizing that if I left my abbreviation as x, it’s conflicting with some other abbreviations or other Snippets I already have created.

So this is a conflicting abbreviation warning.

So TextExpanders saying, “Hey, hold on, Jen, “fix your abbreviation, “otherwise you risk expanding the wrong Snippet “when you’re trying to expand this Snippet.” So you can either finish typing out your abbreviation here, or you can click on that little warning label to get a list of all of the Snippets that are conflicting with that abbreviation. But we’ll go ahead and we’ll just finish this off here and we’ll fix it inside of the warning here and we’ll get our congratulations conflict resolved notice here.

So we’re gonna call this x follow up will be our abbreviation. All right.

So now we fully do have that Snippet finally created.

So let’s go ahead and expand this Snippet together.

Remember if you wanted to, you could absolutely preview that Snippet in the upper right hand corner by clicking on that little eyeball, but let’s expand this Snippet over here in our blank email.

I’m gonna close out of that original Snippet we were using as our example, and we’re going to type in our abbreviation for this new Snippet we created. And so remember our abbreviation is x follow up.

So we’ll type that in.

And our temporary window’s gonna show up here and here are those different fill ins that we created.

Here’s that keyboard press of tab that we’re using to tab down to the body of our email.

Here’s that single-line field that we’re using to address the person that we’re emailing.

And then here’s that popup menu, where we’re saying where we met this person or where we’re following up from. Was it a mixer, a virtual conference, a world conference. Remember, we had virtual conference set as our default here. So it’s showing up as the default, but it’s the second option in the popup menu. You can choose any of those choices that you want there.

Here is that multi-line field that we had defaulted to our home address, but again, we could make any changes here that we want to as well.

Here is that hyperlink for our calendar so that they can book some time with us on our calendar.

And then here’s my signature with my logo that we inserted as a picture here. So we’ll go ahead and click okay to fully expand that Snippet.

And you can see that Snippet expands And then we are able to see our full Snippet expanded into our blank email there with all of those really cool fill ins that we just created.

So yay.

Look at us. We created a Snippet.

So if you just did that with me, congratulations, I’m really glad that you were able to do that. Please let us know in the questions room, if you learned any new features or if you have any questions so far, but I hope that you were able to learn some cool new features there. Definitely let us know what you learned.

I’m gonna go ahead and erase this just again so we have a blank canvas and I wanna show you some other cool, really neat, cool features.

The first one I wanna show you is a really helpful option that is called nested Snippets.

Nested Snippets allow you to insert or reference one Snippet within another Snippet.

And they’re really helpful because you can make updates to just one or that one reference Snippet, and then every other Snippet that it’s been nested into will automatically update. So let’s go ahead and let me actually show you an example.

Email signatures are a very common place to use nested Snippets, because things in your emails or in your signatures could change, right? Your title could change, your last name could change, how you want to sign off could change. You may not wanna say cheers, you may wanna say, thanks from now on. Your logo could change, anything could change in that signature.

So nested Snippets for signatures are one of the most common ways that I see people use nested Snippets, but there’s tons of other ways as well.

But let’s go ahead and actually create one here together. The first thing is you have to have a Snippet for your signature already created.

And so I already have one here and it’s x dot sig is my abbreviation. So you can see I had a Snippet for my signature Jennifer’s signature.

So if we go back to the Snippet that we were just working on creating together that follow up Snippet, I’m going to remember what my abbreviation was. It was x dot sig for that signature Snippet.

And I’m actually just gonna erase this signature that I manually put into this Snippet and I’m going to insert a nested Snippet here.

So to do that, I’m gonna go up to my editing bar and I’m going to find the keyboard macros drop down, it looks like a keyboard and I’ll select insert Snippet here. TextExpander then will give me a dialogue window where it’s asking me to type or paste in the abbreviation of the Snippet I would like to nest or insert here.

So remember for me it was x dot sig. So we’ll go ahead and insert my signature Snippet there. And now, instead of showing my signature, I’m showing the abbreviation for the Snippet I’ve now nested into my Snippet.

And so let’s go ahead and take a preview of what this Snippet would look like with my nested signature.

So we’ll go up to our preview button and you can see instead of actually showing just the abbreviation of the Snippet, I’m actually seeing my full x dot sig Snippet expanded. So my signature Snippet, the cheers, Jennifer Burnett, customer success. Now let me show you how this is so helpful.

So if we go back to where I actually have that signature Snippet, which is right here, my x dot sig signature Snippet, I could change, let’s say, I didn’t wanna say cheers anymore and I wanted to say, thanks. “Thanks, Jennifer Burnett, customer success.”

I can change that here in my signature Snippet and because I’ve changed it here and I have not changed my abbreviation, if I go back to any email Snippets or any place I have that Snippet nested, it’s automatically gonna change for me. That abbreviation has stayed the same, but if we preview, now instead of showing cheers, it shows, thanks, Jennifer Burnett, customer success.

So if you’re anything like me, you’re already thinking of all of the great Snippets and the ways that you wanna create. So nested Snippets are gonna be something that you’re gonna be able to use in so many different ways.

So I encourage you to continue thinking about how you can use nested Snippets and all the different ways that you can coordinate nested Snippets into what you’re doing on a daily basis, your daily workflow. So that’s nested Snippets, really cool feature.

But let’s move on and I wanna show you another really cool feature. So I’m a person who, before I started using TextExpander, working for TextExpander and using TextExpander, let me just say, I used TextExpander before I worked for TextExpander.

When you start using TextExpander, you are going to want to look at all of those repetitive things that you’re doing.

I used to have a Word document of all the frequently used things that I would send off to people or notes I would use, emails I would send. And so I was constantly copy and pasting from that frequently used document.

So if you’re anything like me, you’re going to wanna turn things like that into Snippets. And we have a really cool and easy way for you to do that.

And that is with one of my favorite TextExpander features and it’s new Snippet from clipboard.

So my Mac users, you can access this from your menu bar at the very top right of your menu bar. If you click on TextExpander and right click on it, you’ll get a little dropdown where you can create from clipboard. For Window users like myself, we’re gonna do that from our task pane down here in the bottom.

And if we right click on TextExpander, we can click new Snippet from clipboard. But you can also set TextExpander up to include a hotkey inside of your preferences to allow you to create a new Snippet from your clipboard. So I just have created just by using the hotkey that I already have set up in my preferences, I’ve started to create a new Snippet here. So we can figure out, or if we wanna change that Snippet into formatted text and pictures or plain text, we can apply a label here, we can apply an abbreviation.

We can choose which group we want that Snippet to be included in.

So you can apply and create Snippets directly from your clipboard, rather than having to just build out, you can just copy directly to your clipboard and use the hotkey or those different features, those different ways that I was just teaching you about and you can create new Snippets. All right.

So that is creating from clipboard.

The next feature that I wanna show you is an absolute game changer. Again, if you’re like me, your Snippet library’s gonna continue to grow. And there is no way you’re going to be able to remember all of those Snippets that you’ve created. All of those labels, all of those abbreviations.

So having a way to search your Snippet library is going to be so helpful to you. Luckily for you, TextExpander has that already, and it is called in-lines search.

So this search function is going to help you be able to remember all of your abbreviations, again, especially as your library continues to grow.

So there are hotkeys already set up inside of TextExpander for that in-line search.

For my Mac users, your hotkey is command forward slash.
For anyone on PC or Windows like myself, our hotkey is control forward slash and for anyone in that Google Chrome browser or that Chrome extension, it’s gonna be control period.

So I’m gonna go ahead and open up my TextExpander in-line search. I encourage you to try this along with me, again, command forward slash for Mac, control forward slash for Windows, control period for the Chrome extension.

And we can very easily search to find the different emails or the different Snippets that we’re looking for. So we just created a follow up Snippet. So if we type in follow, TextExpander’s gonna give me a list of everything in my library that has follow in the label or in the abbreviation.

I can hover over those Snippets to get a little preview of what that Snippet is to see what it is. I can also see the abbreviation listed out here, and then I have hotkeys on the right that I can use to expand that Snippet.

Or I can remember the abbreviation and just type it in or even easier yet, I can just click on that Snippet and that Snippet will expand for me.

So again, here are your hotkeys on your screen. If you are on a Mac, your hotkey is command forward slash, if you’re a Windows user, it is control forward slash and anyone on the Chrome extension, their hotkey is gonna be control period. All right.

So that was a ton of information. So I will take a quick little breather here and allow you to take a quick little breather and I’ll ask Rex if there are any questions that we might be able to answer. Rex can you-

  • We’re all set for right now.

All right. Perfect. All right. I’m gonna and this is good news. Okay.

So we are definitely towards the end of our webinar.

So I’m gonna go actually ahead and minimize down. I hope you were able to grab those hotkeys. I’m gonna minimize down my blank email there and give TextExpander a little bit more room here on my screen, put it in the middle of the screen there.

And what I wanna do now is quickly organize the Snippets that we just created today. And I want wanna also discuss preferences that are available inside of TextExpander. So now that we have a few Snippets actually created, it’s important to keep them organized so that you and others on your team can easily find them in the future and know where to find them.

So let’s go ahead and actually organize the Snippets that we just created today. Remember, groups are super important because they help you keep your Snippets organized and they allow for easier sharing of Snippets with others.

So you’re going to organize in your groups. We’ve already gone over the different groups that are available for you. Since we’ve already created a group, we’ll just need to select that group from the groups list.

And then actually in the middle pane, we’re gonna select the group settings button to edit it. That’ll open up that group settings for us here, and we can actually rename this group. We named it as TextExpander webinar, but let’s give it a better name here. So let’s actually call this sale, oops, let’s call this sale conferences for… Oh my goodness. Sales conferences emails. I double pasted there. All right.

So we’ll call this sales conference emails. And so that’s what we’re gonna go ahead and call our group. And then below that, we have our notes section.

Notes are where you’re gonna be able to further explain what the Snippet Group is used for.

And as your Snippet Groups in your Snippet library continues to grow, these notes are gonna be really helpful for you to keep track of what each of your groups are intended for. Again, this is another way that we can stay organized and organization helps with productivity, and that’s why TextExpander was created and why you are here. So we’ll go ahead and use this note section, and I’m going to paste in some notes. So we’ll go ahead and use that note section and be descriptive here, especially as you’re sharing Snippet Groups to your organization or with others, that way they know what you created that Snippet Group for. All right.

The next thing that we’re going to look at below are here. And so we have our expand in preference.

This is where you are going to be able to choose what apps and where your Snippets for this Group will actually expand in.

So right now it’s set to default and preferences, which references the preferences set in TextExpander. We’ll look at those preferences here in a couple of minutes. We have some other options here.

You have all applications, and this means that you can expand TextExpander anywhere on your computer. So all applications on your computer.

You have all applications except this is the default setting that allows you to use TextExpander on specific applications, I’m sorry, to not allow TextExpander to expand on specific applications.

And then you do have the other option, which is only these applications. This is where you can set those specific applications that you want TextExpander to expand in, like maybe your CRM or your email or something like that.

And you have no applications disabled. So in the event that you wanted to disable TextExpander, maybe you are no longer using the Snippet Group, but it still has a ton of really good information that you wanna keep, you can set that to be disabled. So those Snippets can’t be accidentally expanded, or maybe you’re in the process of creating that Snippet Group and you don’t wanna accidentally expand those Snippets while you’re currently creating them. You can set that to no applications disabled.

And then we have our expand when setting. So this is where you’re gonna choose when your Snippets expand. So right now it’s set to white space proceeds abbreviation. You wanna select this if you want your Snippets to expand only if there’s a space before your abbreviation. This is how we have been using TextExpander during today’s webinar and it’s perfect for those autocorrect Snippets that we were talking about earlier.

You also have all the letters and numbers proceed abbreviation. Sometimes you need to expand an abbreviation next to a character such as a parenthesis or an at sign, changing this setting to expand when all that letters and numbers proceed abbreviation allows you to do that.

And then you have any character proceeds abbreviation. You’ll wanna select this if you want your Snippets to expand with any letter, number or characters present. So even if it’s in the middle of the word. This is great for symbol groups if you need to add parenthesis symbol or a hyphen, you wouldn’t need to worry about what came before it, but we’ve been using again TextExpander with a white space proceeds abbreviation today.

And now we’re at prefixes. So prefixes are those characters that are placed before your abbreviation. There are a great way to organize your Snippets.

And as your Snippet library continues to be built out and to grow, they’re going to help reduce accident abbreviation expansion.

For the Snippets we created today, I put least a very simple x before my abbreviation. And this was the prefix that I applied for those different Snippets.

If you’re just getting started, you may want to use Xs or double Xs or two forward slashes or something like that or other double letters.

Those are great prefixes.

But if you find yourself adding those prefixes manually to every abbreviation, it may be time to consider group prefixes.

If I add a prefix in my group settings here, it will then be applied to all of the Snippets in that group, reducing my manual efforts for me.

So let’s actually apply a group prefix here of con dot, because these are conference email or conference Snippets.

So our group prefix will now be con dot, which means now since we’ve applied a group prefix, all of the Snippets inside of the Snippet Group, or that will be added to the Snippet Group will now have that prefix applied to them. So if we go back and look at our Snippets here, we now have our con follow up and that prefix of con is now applied. We can very simply just go back and back out the X.

So now our Snippet with the prefix is just con dot follow up or con dot sub. So now we have the prefix is applied to our different Snippets inside of the Snippet Group. All right.

So we’re almost done here.

And so what I wanna show you now is preferences and preferences in TextExpanders are located in the bottom left of your screen, you can click on preferences. I encourage you to take a look at preferences, for time sake, I’m just gonna hit on a couple of things.

Your hotkeys are here, so you can create that from clipboard hotkey if you’d like to, your in-line search hotkey is here, but I wanna look at our expansion preferences. And I wanna talk about delimiters.

Delimiters are where you can choose, maybe you’re somebody who does not like TextExpander to immediately expand your Snippets, you can choose to set a delimiter to tell TextExpander when you want a Snippet to be expanded by pressing a keyboard key. And so you can see you have a bunch of different delimiters you can select here, and then you can see the ones that are selected off.

You have a couple of different ways you can apply this. Right now, you’d have to change your expansion mode. It’s set to immediately when typed, which is how we’ve been using TextExpander, but if you wanted to include a delimiter, you’d select one of the delimiter options, the all delimiter keep delimiter which means TextExpander would expand your Snippet.

But it would also include the keyboard press that you selected to expand that Snippet, or you can abandon the delimiter which you would then use the keyboard press to expand the Snippet and TextExpander would forget that keyboard press and it would not be included.

So that is delimiters and that is preferences inside of TextExpander.

Again, I encourage you to spend some time inside of preferences, and I encourage you to continue expanding inside of TextExpander and taking a look at the different things that are available to you. So let’s go ahead and we will finish up this webinar here and am going to give you a little bit, prop that back up on the screen.

And I wanna share with you a little bit more information and you’ll be receiving a survey from us, and we would appreciate any of your comments, any feedback that you have, let us know if there’s anything new that you learned or anything that maybe you didn’t learn that you would like to learn.

But today we did cover creating plain text and formatted text Snippets. We looked at different fill ins that are available to you, such as single-line fields. We organized our Snippets and we updated some of our settings and preferences.

So again, take some time today, create a few more Snippets of your own, using those fill ins that we use. If you do end up having any further questions, feel free to email our support department at support@textexpander.com.

They’re absolutely fantastic and they would be happy to help you out with anything. Rex and I will be here next time for another webinar. So stay tuned. You can always join us in other webinars, and we’re so thankful that you joined us for today.

  • Thanks guys.
  • Thank you. Bye-bye.