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Consider how often the main character’s name appears and you’ll begin to get an idea of how effective TextExpander is. For instance, for my active story, I’ll create a snippet called mc which will expand into the name of the main character of the story. When I am working on a story or a novel draft, I’ll create snippets for common things like character names, which I can easily expand to save time writing. I rarely have time to do that, and in those instances, I reply to the email message and in the body I type guestpost and it expands into my default reply.
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I get quite a few requests to write guest posts, for instance. I have a number of common replies that I’ve created for frequently-asked questions that I get in email.
#Phraseexpress 13 full#
I can type address and it expands into my full address. If I am filling out a form online and it asks for my street address, I can type street and it expands into my street address. This will expand into my home phone number. If I am writing an email and tell something to call me at home, I can include my home phone number by simply typing hphone. There are things that I type frequently throughout the day. TextExpander makes it easy to take a short phrase and expand it into something longer. I don’t have to type the entire URL and there is the added benefit of eliminating the risk that I might make a typo if I do type it manually. I preface my shortcuts with two semi-colons to avoid a conflict with the word itself.įor example, when I type paperless, it automatically expands into. The shortcut for each appears in the gray oval to the right. My snippetsĪbove you can see a list of some of my more common TextExpander snippets. I type the shortcut and it automatically expands into the full text. TextExpander allows me to create shortcut phrases for these common things so that I don’t have to type the whole text every time. Email addresses, phone numbers, and common replies are just a few examples.
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I am sitting at a keyboard all day, and there are many things I find myself typing over and over again. My Golden Rule of productivityįor context: if I have to do something more than once, I try to automate the process.
#Phraseexpress 13 windows#
On my Windows machine, I use a tool called PhraseExpress, which does the same thing–and it can even use my TextExpander settings files, which I keep on Dropbox for this very purpose. So I thought I’d give folks a peek into my TextExpander snippets so you can see what I am talking about. Although the name is pretty clear, if you’ve never used the tool, it might not be obvious how it can help speed up your day. When I talk about how I use TextExpander to increase my productivity, I sometimes get questions about what TextExpander actually does.
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