Hi! So, as you may see on this website, I don’t post frequently and that’s large because I don’t give myself enough time to do so. So what I realized – at least to get me in the habit of writing more frequently, is to just do some more basic blog posts, and then gradually as I develop a better writing habit, I’ll be writing more full-fledged and detailed content. Anyways, so with that out of the way, let’s jump in today’s content.
TextExpander
Auto Text Expander is here to solve that — kinda like TextExpander for Mac or AutoText for Windows, but installed and synced across Chrome. Auto Text Expander is extremely easy to use and you can set your own abbreviations for your own frequently used content.
Ahead we will be focusing on a range of tools that will help you in your workflow, help you work more efficiently and spend less time on tedious and mundane tasks. Some of these will be phone apps, some Chrome extensions, some dowloadable software, some websites, and perhaps even some mental hacks. We’ll see.
First is the Auto Text Expander, which I’ve been a great fan of for quite some time. In a nutshell, Auto Text Expander lets you write small selected phrases which then populates into whatever longer content you may need. The specific tool that I’ll be highlighting is a Chrome extension, however, there are similar tools for other browsers and event mobile apps.
These are some of the best uses I’ve discovered for it:
Template Email
Probably the easiest way to envision this tool working in your favour if you write a lot of similar emails. Say you got a certain cold email or follow-up email with clients, you could easily turn that into a Text Expand shortcut.
I personally use it a lot for email booking requests which I make a lot of, and I use at times to communicate effectively with over 70+ students each semester at the University of Hong Kong.
That being said, Gmail Labs also has canned responses that can do relatively similar things, but why use that if this tool can do it + the additional benefits highlighted below AND it would work on Outlook and other places where you might write similar content.
Personal Details
Think about all the forms you fill out in a given week, sign-up forms asking for your name, phone number, maybe even address and so forth. What if you could just easily type those in with 2 or 3 keystrokes?
So instead of writing my full email address, I would type “em;” and that would automatically turn into myemailaddress@gmail.com, or say if I type “ph;” it would turn into my phone number, and “ad;” turns into my full home address.
Bitly Links and Websites
This scenario may or may not apply to you, but I often find myself needing to refer to certain URLs and links, and it can be really challenging to remember all of them. That’s why I’ve written a shortcut that spews out the relevant links of a certain company or project that I’m working on, and then I’ll just remove the ones that do not apply to the respective situation. For example, with our Foundation for Shared Impact, I got various bitly links leading to various places, but so I just type “bitlyfsi;” and then it converts into a list of all those links without me having to move away from the email I’m typing up and look elsewhere for these. All in all, it saves me a lot of time that I would otherwise use searching for those links.
Note that the tool does sadly not work inside Google Docs, but it works inside Gmail and most other places that I’ve come across. For Gmail, you may use the following solution instead.
Navigate to X and then select shortcuts, there you will be able to write in basic shortcuts. However, these shortcuts are not multi-line, nor do they enable formatting, so they are much more limited than what you can do with Auto-Text Expander elsewhere.