Make Your Life a Little Easier with Text Replacement

 

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could write your email address on your phone with just two characters?

I mean, how many times do you have to type out your full email address? Typically, you’re filling out a form, which also includes things like your address which can also be lengthy. These things also need to be correct 100% of the time.

I should do a poll but I’m guessing that less than 50% of the people I know have no idea this is a standard feature on Apple’s operating systems. Or, they do but have never thought of ways they could use it to make their lives a lot simpler.

Apple’s cute(?) little explanation of this feature is as follows. If you type ‘omw,’ it will automatically expand to ‘On My Way!’

So let’s take that a step further and figure out a way to auto-expand an email address. Let’s say you’re a swashbuckling pirate looking for revenge for your father’s death and your email address is:

inigomontoyayoukilledmyfather@gmail.com

As you can see, that would be brutal for Inigo to have to type out everytime someone or some company wanted his email address.

The solution that I would tell him is to create a text replacement with the snippet being ‘xg’ (without the single quotes). So anytime he typed out those two little characters, it would expand to his full 39-character address. No mistakes to boot!

Now, I assume your reaction is two-fold. First, you said wow, didn’t you? Secondly, you wondered why I used ‘xg’ as the short snippet.

The key is the ‘x.’ You can feel pretty confident that you aren’t typing a lot of words that have an ‘x’ in it. Sure it happens but not much. Throw a ‘g’ after it (for Gmail), and I bet you can count on a 6-fingered hand how many words you know that includes ‘xg’ in it. In fact, here are all the words that have an ‘xg’ in them.

Here is an article that tells you how to set it up on your iPhone and iPad.

There is also some more good news. These text replacement snippets can sync to all your devices, including your computer over iCloud.

What other ways can you use text replacement to make your life much better? Think of things that you type frequently. Maybe it’s your address or your phone number.

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