This week I'm happy to welcome Smile back as our sponsor here at TMO. Smile makes a several fantastic software packages for us Mac users, and this week our focus is on one of my personal favorites, TextExpander.
For those of you who don't know about TextExpander, you're in for a real treat. In short, TextExpander lets you take chunks of text that you might wind up typing over and over again — an email signature, your mailing address, your phone number, semi-canned replies to support emails — and assign each of those to a small snippet of just a few characters. Instead of typing the whole text of your mailing address each time, you might simply type, “,add” and boom — your full mailing address is pasted in its place, complete with returns and formatting and, perhaps most-importantly: no mistakes! Not only do you save time using TextExpander, you save yourself the headache of having to proofread and all of that.
New in TextExpander 4 is the ability to have pop-up selections baked right into your snippets. If, for example, sometimes you like to include your cell number in your email signature and other times you might want your work number, you can set that as an option. Build one snippet for your signature, assign it to one snippet, and put the pop-up inside. Then when you insert that signature the pop-up appears letting you choose which option you want for that particular email.
As I said, TextExpander is one of my personal favorite utilities, and is one of the very first things I install on any Mac I use. I encourage you to check it out for yourself, and Smile offers a free trial so you can do just that! Check it out and enjoy!