

My favorite technique is turning boilerplate emails into forms.
Text expansion apps for mac pdf#
Streamline your power-Googling and expand pdf to type:pdf but only when you’re in your browser. Simplify file-naming conventions or create a variety of image-based email signatures to match your branding. You can use ddate to fill in today’s date, or type tmrw to get the date for tomorrow. That’s pretty obvious, but there are other little optimizations you can make. I start all my abbreviations with semicolons, but that’s a personal choice. It’s important to pick character strings that you would not normally type, or you’ll be triggering the rule when you don’t mean to. Note that I’ve prefixed the abbreviation with a semicolon. In this case I’ve used af as the abbreviation, which expands to Alexander Fox. So, I set up a simple rule to replace a unique set of characters with the longer string.

I type my name constantly, and I bet you do too. It packs some serious power and gives you a wide range of flexible tools to use as you wish. TextExpander is reliable, similar to other text expansion apps, and cross-platform, so it’s a good place to start. To get started, we need a text expansion application. Since it’s inline, you don’t need to switch apps to copy and paste some template. If you send the same emails over and over, you can save hours every week by replacing those emails with text expansion. You’ll discover the real power of text expansion when you use it to replace more complicated things. Plus, this is the future, so why are we still typing our names? The less time you can spend on menial tasks, the more brainpower you’ll have available for higher-level pursuits. More significantly, you’re decreasing your cognitive load. Like a lot of productivity enhancements, text expansion is all about shaving off a few seconds here and there and letting them add up.

Text expansion apps for mac full#
If you get a text expansion application set up on your machine, you can assign all that repetition to short, unique key combinations that “expand” into the full text. Phone numbers, canned responses, witty ripostes – a lot of the stuff you typed today is probably the same as the stuff you typed yesterday. You can probably hear the clacking of keys in your sleep. And if your job involves programming or medical charting, forget it. If your job involves a computer (and it probably does), you spend a lot of time typing.
