Text Expanders -- Finding What Works for You

As Tara covered in her Systems for Creating Shortcuts post, finding what works for you and is easy for you is the most important task when creating text expanders. If you aren't going to remember to use the shortcut on a regular basis it's not even worth having. For this reason, I give you a short example of the differences in our text-expanding styles.

Tara's ShortKeys

Shortcut	Output
comm	community
comu	communicate
coml	commercial
comte	commitee
prob	problem
prog	program
proj	projects

Mandi's ShortKeys

Shortcut	Output
comm	community
commu	communicate
comme	commercial
commi	committee
prob	problem
prog	program
proj	project

My ShortKeys

Shortcut	Output
comt	community
comu	communicate
coml	commercial
comie	committee
prb	problem
prg	program
prj	project

You can see we all have different ways of deciding what combination of keystrokes will work best for us. While both Tara and Mandi went with pro as their prefix for problem, program and project, I chose to eliminate the O because I doubt my ability to remember to hit Control and cancel the ShortKey from expanding when I come across someone who says, "No prob." To keep the rest easy for me, I continued with that when creating program and project as well.

Whatever method you decide works best for you, go with it. When you are adding our text expander lists to your text expander program of choice, consider how that fits in with your current way of doing things and whether or not you can make it better for you. The end result should be increasing your productivity, so be sure whatever method you choose is easy for you and does just that.