How To Share Snippets, Your Knowledge and Experience

Sharing your knowledge and experience is key, especially for remote teams. If you’ve been flying solo on TextExpander, whipping up your own Snippets and using them to make typing effortless, you know how nifty those shortcuts can be. And you’re probably saving yourself quite a lot of time.

Have you ever thought, “What’s the best way to phrase this request?” before wondering whether your co-worker has it figured out? Perhaps you’ve wondered if the newbie has found a clever way of adjusting snippets to make them even more efficient.

If it’s crossed your mind that it might be useful to share some Snippet knowledge, then you’re in luck. It is totally possible. With a little sharing know-how, you can be the genius who has the whole team using Snippets. This keeps your team on-brand and gives everyone access to the collective knowledge and experience of the team.

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

Sharing personal Snippet Groups

Creating public Snippet Groups

Tips for sharing Snippets with colleagues

Without further ado…

Sharing personal Snippets

If you’ve created some super useful Snippets, you should share them. For example, that Snippet group with all the proposals and requests you use each year to organize the annual auction or organize the troops for the next cookie sale. This way your, or their, years of experience and process can benefit the whole organization.

Here’s how to share personal Snippets:

1) Locate the group you want to share, click on it, and from Groups Settings, click on Share. This opens TextExpander.com. Or just start from your TextExpander.com account.

2) Find the group of Snippets you’d like to share with someone and click the Add Member button inline with that group.

3) Type in the email address of the person who’d like to use your Snippet group.

4) Voila, your invitee will receive an email invitation to join your group.

Anyone can edit these Snippets, or not, it’s up to you how you prefer to set up your group. Either way, updates are available to everyone, immediately. For more information on editing permissions, read our post on sharing groups.

Creating Public Groups

If you’ve created a Snippet group so good you want to world to see, add it to our Public Groups.

When a group is public, anyone can find it and use the Snippets. So, if you have a group with autocorrect Snippets for your particular field of science, help out your fellow scientists by adding it to Public Groups. Public Groups is also a great place to find new Snippet groups, from medical abbreviations to Star Wars quotes.

Here’s how to create a public group:

1) Create a new group by selecting ‘New Group’ from the app’s toolbar.

2) Drag existing Snippets into your new group.

3) Click on the group name to open the Group Settings, then click “Share”. This takes you to share settings of the group on TextExpander.com

4) Scroll down to see the Public Sharing section. Publish in Public Groups and you will be prompted to fill out some details, including confirming you have the right the publish the work under the chosen license.

5) Keep an eye on your email inbox: you’ll get a confirmation email when your public group is live.

Check out our tips on good shared Snippet etiquette. For example, making abbreviations that anyone could use, and are unlikely to interfere with abbreviations they already have.

Sharing with your circle

For Snippets you’d like to share with a like-minded circle, you can follow the same steps as above, but opt for the ‘URL Sharing’ option. This gives you a URL anyone can use to subscribe to the Snippet group.

This type of sharing is great if you have a blog or a community. Just post the URL to the group on your web page, closed community page or in a Slack channel. This group will not appear in Public Groups. Everyone who joins your group will get updates, but only you – the author – can edit.

Sharing with TextExpander for Teams

If your team uses TextExpander at work, and you have a TextExpander for Teams account, then sharing Snippets is even faster. And there are plenty of reasons to have co-workers sharing Snippets.

For example, the TextExpander team all have access to the Smile group, meaning we always use the correct spelling and capitalization for TextExpander. Plenty of people can misspell your product’s name, you shouldn’t be one of them :).

Sharing Snippets in TextExpander for Teams:

1) Sign into TextExpander.com. From your main Groups list click on the Add Member button of any group and you will be taken to that group’s Sharing tab.

2) Once there, click on the Add Member button inline with Organization Members.

3) You’ll see a list of all members in the organization, or you can search using names. Click on the arrow next to their name to add them to the Snippet group.

Some examples of what sharing looks like in an organization

New members will immediately have the group available to them; there’s no need to wait for them to accept an email invitation.

To make sharing Snippets with colleagues as seamless as possible, consider using abbreviations, as outlined in our blog post on How To Use Snippet Group Prefixes for Faster Text Snippets.

Start Sharing Now

It’s time to branch out! Enjoy sharing your collective knowledge and experience in Snippets.

Try TextExpander yourself with a 30-day free trial and discover what TextExpander can do for you and your team. When you’re ready, contact our sales team to supercharge your support team. Team-based pricing starts as low as $8.33 per user per month.