Automatically populate regular email fields, capitalise acronyms and add standard phrases and paragraphs in documents with a snippet in TextExpander.
What Is A Snippet And How Does It Work
It’s simply a short set of keystrokes which expand into a longer phrase, sentence or paragraph. Their use is only limited by our imagination.
Some practical examples:
Recurring Emails
I used to run a professional services firm in Hong Kong and we had a team meeting every Monday morning. Post meeting we did a note of the issues arising, allocating responsibility and emailed it to all the participants. It’s easy to automate emails which you send to the same group of people on a regular basis. TextExpander can automatically populate the fields for recipients, CC and BCC and the subject line with just a couple of keystrokes. The writer then just adds any additional comments that might be necessary.
Capital Idea
You can use TextExpander to capitalise acronyms. For example if you want to type “BBC” without using “Caps Lock” you simply type “bbc” and TextExpander will do the rest and output BBC. As a former professional services worker in an industry where acronyms are commonplace, I found this to be a very useful time-saving tool.
Snippets
Invoke standard phrases, paragraphs in letters, reports or emails with a snippet. Save time, avoid typing errors and ensure accurate and consistent messaging. This is particularly useful when dealing with new client enquiries; preparing new proposals; and reports to clients (if that’s part of your business). It also helps to enhance your reputation for getting things right. That in turn helps to impact on your profitability.
Client names and addresses can be reduced to snippets. In that way, when you write to the client the name and address comes out correctly every time. (My pet peeve is receiving correspondence that is incorrectly addressed – it just points to sloppy business practice.) Combining this with a Word macro for creating your correspondence supercharges your and your team’s productivity.
