We all have those phrases we need to type over and over again throughout the day. Things like “have a nice day,” “I checked with the production department and your order is on schedule,” or even repetitive snippets of programming code. They are too small to store in a template, but take up enough of your day that having some way to drop these in place whenever you needed them could save you lots of time.
Welcome to the world of text expander software. These small pieces of software live in your computer’s memory. When they see a known string of text, they expand that into the full stored tag. It’s like auto correct in some word processors.
For instance, I have several email signatures: A full one with all of my contact info that I use for new contacts. For that I use the string “bsig”, and several shorter ones that I use with people I speak with all the time, like “ssig” for a simple “Best regards,” “sthx” for a “Thank you,” and “shgw” for a Friday-only “Have a good weekend,”
The trick to creating a good text expanding string is to find something that you would not normally type in the space of normal writing. For instance I chose “lin” to be the shortcut string to insert a link to my Linked In profile. This worked fine until I started working with a person who had the last name of Lin. When I would refer to her in my correspondence, people instead got my Linked In profile, which was very confusing. Changing that string to “.lin” solved that problem.
Text expansion software is available on all major desktop and smart phone platforms and makes it easy to make yourself more productive by recycling your data. In a future post, we will detail sources for some of these programs to help you improve your productivity.
