 If you type on your Mac, then this video is for you. Hello, welcome to Take One Tech, my name's Alec. And this video really is, I think, for every single Mac user. It is one of those apps that I've been using for well over 15 years now, and it's just an essential part of my Mac workflow and one of the sort of core of my productivity tools, I would say. I hate to think how much time, oh, I don't hate to think, I love to think how much time that this tool must have saved me over the years. It's paid for it, paid for itself many times over. And it is really an essential, I think, if you type on your Mac, you'll find out what I mean. It's a little app called TextExpander. And TextExpander, believe it or not, expands text. So it's easiest if I just actually give you a little demo and you'll see exactly what I mean. So I've got a blank note opened up here, and all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna type a few keystrokes, I'm gonna type hi, followed by comma, comma, comma. And there you go. I've expanded that little few keystrokes out into, well, a few paragraphs of text. So why is that useful? Well, I'm hoping that you can immediately see why that is useful. But if you have to type things over and over again on your Mac, which I think everyone does, even if it's just your name, your email address, your website URL or something like that, or even longer blocks of texts. So for example, if people, you know, you get writing stock responses to emails and things like that for your business, or if somebody's, you know, asking for a quote or something like that, maybe you have a stock response that you give to them or the way things work or contractual agreements and things like that. There's no end of possibilities of things that people have to type repeatedly that this can just do with a few keystrokes. So that is how I use it. I do have a number of email addresses that I use. So I've got a few keystrokes within basically four keystrokes. I can access any of my email addresses. So if somebody just emails me, or if they email me to ask my email address, if they message me to ask me my email address, then I can go in the messenger and just type in, you know, four keystrokes and put in the correct email address that I want to be contacted on. Similarly for my website, or if you're filling out forms online for various different things and they're asking for, you know, an email address or a website or your home address or something like that, then you can store those in here as well. It does get a bit more advanced than that though as well. So I'm going to show you a few examples of exactly what you can do with it, starting with some basic ones and then we'll get into something a little bit more advanced. So we're going to start by coming over to this screen sharing here. And I've got a text expander open and you can see, well, let me just start with some basics first. Along the top, we've got a very basic menu with adding new snippet and new group, come onto groups in a moment, delete the snippet, some statistics, which is about the time saved using the app, which is quite phenomenal once you've been using it for a while. Then we've also got preferences as well up there. And then down the side, we've basically got this sidebar which is where you have groups of little snippets. So these little expansion things where they are called snippets. And so I've got them grouped by different sort of companies that they're related to or by the sort of action. So I've got some that are specifically code snippets for when I'm doing a coding, then I've got little blocks of code that I use regularly. So I've got little expansion snippets for those emails and URLs. So I've got lots of different URLs for various different things. It doesn't have to be your own URL. It could be, for example, affiliate links, things like that, or just links to things that you want to share with other people. If you are an Amazon affiliate, then having all of your Amazon affiliate links as snippets. So if somebody asks for some particular product or something, you can easily remember them or not remember them, but just send them. I've got some for Omnifocus. So I use Omnifocus as my task manager and I've got a whole series of snippets around that in terms of how I label and do things in there. And then as I say, yeah, just different ones for different companies and things like that. So it just helps to keep them all organized into groups. I don't know how many, I've got well over a thousand. I've lost count, to be honest. But yeah, I just use it all of the time. And this is one of those things where you don't have to think that you've got to plan out all of these snippets from the beginning. You just go through your day to day and then as you notice that you're typing things over and over again, then just create a snippet for you. And in fact, TextExpander will notice when you are typing the same thing over and over again and even recommend, hey, do you want to create a snippet for this? So let's do a couple of examples. So we've got this little demo group that I've set up first and then here it says, this is this one that I've just activated as that little initial demo. So I've called it Hi There and the snippet work, the abbreviation was Hi followed by three commas. And here you can see on this side, this basically is the panel where we're going to define our snippet. So here we've got the actual body of the text which is going to be added in. And then we've got our label. So I'll call it Hi There. So the label is what appears here. And then we've got our abbreviation, which is this and that is what appears here. And that is also what you type to sort of activate the snippet. So let's create a new one by coming down to the little plus sign here and creating a new snippet. And now what you'll find is, I'll ask you, do you want to create a group, a new snippet or add a public group? So a public group is there are shared snippets and things like that that you can add into your text expander. But for now, we're just going to create a new snippet. And so you can see that that has added a new snippet into the current group that we're in and it just says empty at the moment. And we've got an empty space and we've also got no label or abbreviation. So let's just say this is our first snippet. Because it's just to give you a little example of how easy it is to set it up. So that's the text that we want. And then the label, let's just call this first snippet so we know what it is. And then let's put for the abbreviation first. And then I'm going to use comma, comma. So the reason why I use the double commas is because when you're thinking about the short little text string that you're going to want to use to actually expand your text snippets out, you don't want to use something that you're going to inadvertently be typing just in your day to day typing. So you wouldn't want to just use first, for example, because you might just be typing first and you don't want that to expand out every time. So having a, I use a double comma, it just is something that's close to my fingers easy to reach. And it's something that's not going to automatically necessarily come up as I'm typing because I don't put double commas anywhere other than in my snippet. So that's why I use that. You could use other things as well, but it's just, that's what I find is convenient. So if I, now that's, that's by the way, that is it. That is as difficult as it is. So we've got our snippet. This is our first snippet. We've called it first snippet. So that appears up here. And our little string that we're going to have is first. You could obviously make that even shorter. I could even, let me just make it F. Let me just make it F comma, comma to make it even shorter. And then you can see that that's the snippet there. So if I come down to my text notes here and I just type F comma, comma, there you go. It's just expanded it out. It is that easy to program them. But we can get a little bit more advanced than this as well because if you look into the, in this, the, the panel here we've got a few other actions that we can add up at the top or a few little drop down menus. And you can add in things like dates. So what if we wanted to actually put the date that this snippet was in? So if we were recording some bit of information and we might want to put the full date. So let's just say we wanted to put the day and then a space. And then we wanted to put the month of January. Oh, it's not January is it? But that's just what it's showing you the format of it. So if I click there, look, you can see that I'm choosing the day and the type of day format and then the month and the format of the month and then the year and the format of the year. So let's just, in fact, let me come back to the day. I could even put the actual day of the week, couldn't I? So let me just put this here. You'll see what I'm doing in a moment. So there I've put the, that one. And then now I'm going to put the actual year as well. And then maybe a hyphen like that. And now if I put my text snippet and I just type F, comma, comma, there you go. It's put today's date and this is our first snippet. So you can add in dates and things like that. There is other sort of date logic, I guess for a, one of a better word, it's not logic. That's not true. Date calculations, I suppose. So you can, oh, so I've missed one out there. First of all, you can add in time and in terms of the AMPM, time in seconds and minutes and hour and so on of the day. So you can add in a full date stamp and timestamp. But you can also add years, months, days, hours, minutes and so on. So you could say, you know, put in the day plus five, the current day plus five days or something like that. So I use that with some task management things that I do. I want to have a date and then I want it to be, you know, certain days in the future and things like that. So you can add that all in here as well. The next one you come to in this little series of dropdowns is you can add some keyboard strokes. So for example, enter, escape, return, tab, clipboard, which means inserting something from the clipboard or actually insert another snippet into this snippet. So we'll actually have a look at this and we'll create another example because where you might want to use these things, this is where it actually becomes quite powerful, is let's just say, for example, you've got a business and you sometimes get people messaging you and asking, can you send me more information about your business? And you say, yeah, sure, just send me your email address and I'll send it over. So let's just say, if I scroll down here, we've got somebody and this imagine, this is in our messaging app in WhatsApp or whatever it happens to be and somebody sent us over their company name, joe at somecompany.com. What we want to do is we want to create a text, expand a snippet basically so that we can open up a new email and then we can just have copied their email address and then what we want to do is in this new email, let me just pull up a new email, I just want to click in the to field and I want it to paste in the email address. I want it to go down to the subject, paste in or put in a subject and then go down to the next field down to the main body of the email and then we want to be able to have the option to put his name in and then we want it to fill out all of the other company details that we want to send him. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to in text expander, I'm going to create a new snippet. So I'm going to come here again and click on the new snippet. And now this one, I'm just going to label it first. So let's say this one is company info mail and for the abbreviation, I'm going to name that now is just mail, comma, okay. And now what we want to do is we're going to get a bit clever and use some of these extra functions. So as I said, bear in mind the sort of flow of this is somebody sent you their email address in a messaging app or something like that and you want to be able to copy the email address and then you want to be able to come into your email and it will just send them an email. So I'm going to come here and the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to click into this little keyboard macros dropdown and what we want to do is come to the clipboard. So I click on that one. It's now added clipboard in. So what that's going to do is wherever we happen to be it's going to paste the clipboard when we activate this text snippet and paste in the clipboard contents. So in terms of an email, we are going to put our cursor into the two field. So it will paste in the email address. Then what we want to do is we want to go tab twice to tab to the subject field. So if I come here, now I'm going to go to my little dropdown again and click tab and then I'm going to add another one in. So now, whoops, don't want to return, I want tab. There we go. So now we are in the subject field. So now let's say here is the company info you requested. Okay, so that is basically our subject line. And now we're going to go and tab once more. So we click on here to go to tab. So now we're in the body of the email when we activate this snippet. So now we're going to say hi, but we need the person's name. So we'll put a space. And what we want to do here is we want to give ourself the option to fill in some information. So we're going to come here and we're going to add this fill in dropdown. And now you can add in either a single line field. So that's basically like a single line of text that you want to add in, which is what we do want. You can also add a multi-line field if you want to drop in a whole paragraph of text or something like that in addition to the main snippet. Also, you can have an optional selection. So that is basically if you want to give yourself the choice of a couple of things. So the way that you might use that is if you're giving a proposal or something and you might have two different versions of it, you want to select which one you want or a pop-up menu that's going to come up to just give you the same sort of thing where you can just choose between one or two different options. So we're going to come down to just after we've written hi and we're going to click on this fill ins and we're going to put a single line field. Now here, what we're doing is we're actually defining this field. So we're going to give it a name. So it is actually the name of the person. So the name of the field is name as well. And then the default value, we're going to leave that out for now because it's basically it's somebody's name. There is no default for that, is there? And then we've got the width and we'll come to that in the moment. That's basically just the width of the space that you've got to enter the information when you activate the snippet and it pops up. You'll see what I mean in a moment. So there we've got our name. So now we're going to come in here and we're going to just hit another couple of returns. And then let me just grab a bit of random text. So here we go. I'll just add this in. So let's just say that this is our company information that we're wanting to send over like this. Oops, stickler for the formatting even though it's a total nonsense example. And then we'll say, have a great day. I like, there we go. And look at that. I've got to, there you go. So that is basically what we want to send to the person when somebody requests our information. We just want to be able to send them this. So what we're going to do now is we're going to imagine that this has happened and we've basically got this text message that's just come in and they said, can you send us some information? We've said, yes, send me your email. So now we've got the email address from here and I'm just going to press command C on my computer. So I've copied it. So that email address is now in my clipboard. So now if I click in this new email I've gone and created myself a new email. Okay, so I'm going to actually change that because this is one of the few times when I've had to do an edit because I just started typing mail, comma, comma and somebody's email address came up other than mine. So I don't want to be doing that, putting people's email addresses out there. So I'm just going to change this to X, comma, comma. And in fact, I'm just going to put that as X, comma to be extra short. So I'm going to come into here and this is how I'm going to activate the snippet. So I'm just going to activate the snippet by pressing X, comma. And there you can see that as soon as I type the X, comma it's basically just pulled up this little panel here. And this is just happening like over the top of the email. Now here we've got the email address that we copied from up here. It's already pasted that in. And then it's asking us for the name. So this person's name is Joe. Okay, now I'm going to press return and watch what happens. So there you saw that it actually went through and it pasted in the email address. It tabbed twice to the subject. It put in the subject and then it tabbed twice or it tabbed again into the body. And then now we've got, hi, Joe, here's the information, have a great day. And so all of that was done. Well, I mean, it was actually done with two keystrokes, wasn't it? I suppose it was actually done with three because I did command C to copy the email address, went into my email and I pressed X, comma and it did all of that. And then I'm just free to send that email. Pretty amazing, I hope you'll agree. It's certainly a time saver. I've used this all the time for sending information, stock responses to emails. Obviously, you can just reply in an email and you might have another whole series of snippets for that. Another one that I use is I have date stamps in my file naming convention. So if I just type DDD, for example, it expands out to the year, the month and the day. And that's the start of my file names that I have for various different things. It's pretty, pretty amazing. There's other things that you can do in here as well, by the way, which I'm gonna cover in this particular video because we can get quite deep into it. I will do a more advanced text expander video, but you can also, as well as the content being plain text, you can also change it to be formatted text and pictures. So that one I can just do actually. So if I come and create a new snippet and I'll show you how that works, in fact, he says, not knowing if I've got a picture available to drag in, bear with me one second. Okay, I had to pause for a moment there. I had to pause to make sure I got a picture and image that I could drag in. So let me create a new snippet and then I could say, please support my ride for kids cancer. I'm not sure if it's for kids cancer or I'm dead against it. So there we go, I've got that snippet there and then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drag an image in. First of all, I need to change this to formatted text. So then I'm gonna drag an image in as well, like that. And I want to drag the text. Let's make this a little bit bigger. So we've got sort of text formatting options here. So let me just say that I want to make that bold and we can also do a couple of other things. So let's say we want to make that bigger, there we go. And we can also change a few other things like the color. Okay, so I'm gonna give this an abbreviation of ride and then I'm gonna, oh, sorry, a label rather and then an abbreviation of R comma, comma. Okay, now let's just say that I want to send this image and this request to an email address. So I'm just gonna pull up this and just create a new email and then let me just type this little snippet here, R comma, comma, and there you go. It's got the image and it's also got the formatted text as well. So that is how you can with your snippets if I just come back to one of these other ones. With this little dropdown, you can change between formatted text or plain text but you've also got shell script, apple script and JavaScript script. So you can write little snippets of a script, apple script, shell script or JavaScript and have it that those are activated when you type your snippets. I'm not gonna get into that today because it's a little bit advanced for somebody who's just into it for their text editing but I will do a more advanced version where I'll show you some of the things that you can do with that because then that means that you can basically run scripts just by a few little keystrokes. And when you start combining this with keyboard maestro, the two of them I find work extremely well together. Now, I don't think I've mentioned as yet the pricing. So let me come onto that because obviously it is quite an important thing and then I'll tell you a little bit more about it. So first of all, this is where you get it from TextExpandet.com obviously link will be in the description and it is a monthly subscription. It used to be a one-off but now it is a monthly subscription. You can get a free trial and he can find a bit more out about it but the cost of it, if I come to the pricing section, the cost of it is $3.33 a month. If you pay for it up front for a year, if you're billing monthly, then it's $4.16 a month. The amount of time that it saved me, I mean, it saves me far more than this. It's just ridiculous for like the price of a coffee, less than the price of a coffee actually. It's just awesome. So yeah, there is a Teams version as well. So if you want to have groups of snippets that you can share between your team, then here there is the option for that as well. And then there's also Enterprise that you can obviously arrange that if you've got a much larger organization that you want to implement this in. The other thing about it is all of your snippets are synced, so they're synced across your devices and by devices it also syncs across your phone. So let me just show you how that works because that is pretty amazing in itself. Let me come and add in my phone. So here we go, I've got my phone and the way that it works is you install the application on your phone and you log in with your TextExpander login and then all of your snippets are synced to your phone. Now there is a built-in notes app that you can use in there so that you can use all your snippets within that notes app but there's also a actually dedicated TextExpander keyboard. So let me show you how you get to that one second. So in your settings, if you go to General and then you go to Keyboard and then up at the top, you've got keyboards. This is where normally you would add in different keyboards. So I've got my English keyboard, my emoji keyboard and my Thai language keyboard and then I've also got TextExpander and there's a button down at the bottom which is add new keyboard. So when you add new keyboards, it's got all of the Apple ones so other iPhone keyboards are just all down at the bottom. So if you've got different languages and things like that with different characters and whatever, you can add those in. So this is just available for any iPhone. These are all of the built-in Apple ones but there are third party keyboards as well and so this is where you access those. And as you can see there, we've got one called TextExpander. Now I've already activated that. So if I just come back after that, you can see that it's in my list of four there and what you wanna do is just click on that once you've added it in and then make sure that you have allowed full access and that will allow it to basically do other things in the background and basically what it's doing is it's gonna go and grab its snippets from the TextExpander app on the phone as well. So let's have a look at how this works. So now I'm gonna go back to my Notes app and you change the keyboard just as you normally would. So you long press on the little picket down at the bottom and then obviously the usual keyboard is like that and you've got that little globe at the sort of bottom button two from the left. If you click and hold that one then that's obviously where you normally select your different keyboards. So I'm just gonna select my TextExpander keyboard and you can tell that it's TextExpander because it's got that little TextExpander logo down at the bottom left as well. Now I'm just in the Notes app. This is just a regular Apple Notes app but if I type what was one of those ones? So first, which was f, comma, comma. Was it f, comma, comma? Hang on a minute, maybe this doesn't sink. Never do live demos when you've just set something up. Let me try that again. Hi, comma, comma. Yeah, this may be, I'll tell you what this is. Let me tell you. It's not TextExpander, it's me. I'm blocking some of the traffic on my network so it's not actually sinking. Let me try one of the ones that does, I know work. So my date stamp one, there you go. This is currently in my list. It doesn't sink these other ones because I'm blocking network traffic while I record. There we go. So that's one of my date stamp ones. I've got my timestamp one that I showed you earlier. So if I type that. So I'm just typing this on the regular keyboard on the iPhone and it's just expanding these. So I've got all of my different TextExpander snippets, all of those thousands of snippets and now available to me on the iPhone itself. Now, if you actually pair this with another app that I did a review on and posted a video about just yesterday, one called Keys for the Mac that allows you to use your Mac keyboard to type on your phone, well then basically you can just be a speedy and productive on your phone as you are on your Mac and you've got all of the same snippets at your disposal as well. So that is in a nutshell, an introduction to TextExpander. Like I say, you can get really advanced with it. There are some far more advanced features which I'll go into in a later video, but for now I hope you can see how useful that could be. If you have found that useful, don't forget, leave a comment down below. I always love hearing from people and let me know how you're using TextExpander as well. I'd love to know any little tricks and tips that you've got for how you get the most out of it and how you are more productive with it as well. And while you're down there, obviously, don't forget to like and subscribe. Really just helps to get those likes and shows me that I'm doing at least something right if you have found it useful. Now I'm gonna leave a link to a playlist with some other productivity apps over on the right hand side. So don't go anywhere, there's plenty more coming up. Have a great day.