Text Expanders for an Efficiency Boost

So welcome everybody to today's learning objectives, and we are going to talk about text expanders, and I'm going to cut this into 2 parts. One is the things that are built into the Microsoft Office suite and then some third-party tools, and then I'll do a slight demonstration of the, the one that I chose to use, which is called Text Blaze, and, um, I have only started delving into Text Blaze, so I'm, I'm still learning how to use this stuff. But the nice thing with these tools is you can start really simple and still find a lot of value and then continue to build your skills and figure out how to incorporate them, um, going forward. So the first thing is what you've already got, and the one that you probably are familiar with, um, but may or may not be using is this tool called Quick Parts. And Quick Parts is built into Microsoft Word, and it has some, um, benefits and drawbacks. And the benefit is that, uh, it allows you to add phrases and clauses very quickly from an easy dropdown menu. The drawback is, unless you set it up right, it's only available on your computer. And Quick Parts is, is available in Microsoft Word and in Outlook, but separately. So the Quick Parts you create in Word don't carry over to the Quick Parts in Outlook. And that to me is one of the detriments. And then again, they're saved unless you set it up right in Word, it's saved to your computer. So those Quick Parts are only available to you on the computer where you have Word installed. So you can't share them across., the firm or the organization. And again, that's a drawback, but it is there, so I will show it to you. Um, so I've got some samples here. So say we've got a letter that you want to be able to drop in. So in order to use Quick Parts, this is in Microsoft Word, it's in the, um, well, I never can remember where it is. It's maybe in References. If you can't remember where something is, just type it., and usually it'll show you, um, how to do it, but I just put it on my taskbar or my, um, my little, uh, toolbar. So if you select the text and click on Save Selection to QuickPart Gallery, um, this is— we're gonna call this Lat Fee Agreement. It'll give you an option to save it to a different gallery. You want to save it in the Quick Parts gallery. You can categorize these, so you can actually create a category. So if you want to say Fee Agreements, then you can, you can save all of your fee agreement Quick Parts into a particular category. Then you can give it a description., and then the default is to save to building blocks, and then you can insert the content only. You can insert the content as its own paragraph or its own page. So we're just gonna leave it like this. So if I go and create a new document, And I want to insert that QuickPart. Then I go up into QuickParts and it'll show me what I've got in a list and it just drops all that text in. So that's pretty straightforward. Now, if you want to get really fancy with it, um, and you want to turn these into fillable forms, you can actually create your QuickPart with form fields. So you have to go up into the Developer tab. The Developer tab doesn't show by default, so if you've never used it before, you have to right-click and click on Customize the Ribbon, look in this side over here for Developer, and then add it to this side. So I've already done it, but if we reversed the action, um, I would just find Developer over here and then click Add, and this shows up. And then once you've done that, you get this whole new little toolbar that lets you create forms. And so I could say that I wanted this Law Firm Name to be, um, a text field. So I just select it click on it, and now it's a text field. And I can go through— you can do date choosers. So if we wanted to make this, um, a date picker, you got the date. You can do dropdown menus and all that. You can do that and then select this and make it into a QuickPart. So the QuickPart becomes a fillable form. So that's something you can do. Now, like I said, this is stuck in, um, in Microsoft, in my installation of Word. If I wanted to make this into something that I could share with other people, then what I would do is I would go over here and hit File, Save As, and give it— let's see, let The agreement template. And instead of saving as a Word document, we would save this as a, um, Word template. And I'll click Save. And now I'm just copy all this out again. I'm going to save selection to QuickPart Gallery, and we'll say Flat Fee Agreement. QuickParts, Fee Agreements., and it's automatically saving it in the template. Remember before it saved it in Building Blocks? If I save it with this template, now this, this particular QuickPart is stuck to the template. So when you open the document from your templates from File Explorer, you can actually— anybody who opens it from File Explorer, SharePoint, OneDrive, Dropbox, wherever, the QuickPart is stuck with the template. So that's a little nuance to be aware of. Other things you can do— so there's, there's your Save In, and you wanna save it in that.dotx. I showed you the fill in the blank. Another thing you can do is add templates into Microsoft Outlook. Now, this requires that you have a fairly recent version of Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365 in specific. I am using the new Outlook. But this works in the, the old Outlook as well. And so what you have here is you click on New Mail, and let me change this view so we don't have this, um, mess going on. All right, so it's easier to see. And in the Home tab, I'll just use Russell as an example. Actually, let me— so if we're going to send something to my buddy Russell My team is used to me doing tests with them. There is a button in the new Outlook called My Templates, and when you click on it, you can see that I've got a bunch of different templates. These are just emails that I write frequently, and instead of having to type them up again, um, I have created templates so I can drop in pretty much any of these. I can string them together. Some of these are really short. Like a lot of times people ask me for my bio, so I've just got my bio in here. Um, so on and so forth. So, and then it has a picture I can drop in if I want to. And you can create as many of these, and the process to create one of these is exactly the same. So I'm going to show you, um, starting— say you've got, um, say you send out a letter and or an email and you want to let someone know that the, that you're going to have an assistant helping you and you want to introduce them. So I'm just going to select this text and go back over into my email. So you can just type whatever you want. Hi, we look forward And say I want to introduce my legal assistant to this client who we've just onboarded. So you can create that by just pasting in the text. So here's, here's my text. My legal assistant Debbie is going to be helping. This is her role, you know, blah, blah. She's going to be responding to you, and I don't want to ever have to type that again or look it up somewhere or go to last email that I sent or whatever. So I'm going to copy this. I'm going to go into my templates. I'm going to scroll all the way to the bottom. Click on Templates, give it a name, paste in that text, click Save. Too long. So this is already a failure on this. I've never done one that long. Um, I'll just cut this down. Wow, so you're very limited in the number of characters. Um, so we'll do something really short. I'd never tested it in terms of that many characters. So next time you want to drop it in there— try again later, that's funny. We'll give this another shot. All right, so it's just giving me problems today. It does actually work, especially when no one's looking at me doing it. Um, and that's how you do it, and then you can drop it in. But this, again, the reason that I like these third-party text expansion tools is because they work everywhere. So another thing you can do, and we'll do this for, um, in Word, but this also works in, um, old Outlook, but not the new Outlook like what I'm using. Uh, so I'm going to copy this. Say I want to be able to drop this in. There is this whole area in Word, and if you go down to Options under File and you go into briefing, there's this button called AutoCorrect Options, and it does a lot more than you would think. So in AutoCorrect, this is the place where, um, if, if it converts the, you know, paren, paren, um, to the copyright symbol and you don't want it to do that, you can select that and tell it to delete. So every time you fight with AutoCorrect, just be aware that you can identify that it's replacing text with other text, and you can tell it to not do that. But you can also create custom AutoCorrect. So for instance, I've got this one. If I type in slash Calendly, it pops in that text. If I type in slash CPM or /CSR or any of these things. All of these are autocorrect, so I can go through, um, weirdly you can't— it doesn't let you start from scratch again. So we'll do this, um, we're going to do Assistant, click on Add, click on OK, click on OK. And if I'm typing in Word, if I type in assistant and hit Enter, that text enters. Similarly, if I do— and so on and so forth. So you can add those. And the nice thing is they do— those do carry over into Microsoft Outlook. So if you update this in Word, it will show up in Outlook and vice versa. So that's another thing that you can do is use autocorrect. So that's kind of— I've done longer programs on using those things. So if you're interested in getting a little bit more information, I can certainly send those videos. I'll send them over this afternoon. But what we really wanted to focus on today was the third-party text expansion tools. And there's a lot on the market. Um, one of the participants earlier mentioned that he was using AText for, um, Macs. Um, TextExpander is one of the ones that's been around for quite some time, and it— there's all sorts of things that you can do that, again, it works across your computer. So whether you're in Word or Outlook or Gmail or Google Docs or in a webpage or Notepad or wherever you are. TextExpanders work wherever you are. And one of the kind of valuable things, especially for firms, is that you can start building out TextExpanders if you pay for the product to use it in for multiple people. So you can have team versions so that you can start building out TextExpander, um, dropped-in text for people across the firm. So it works for everybody. So you can create snippet libraries and things like that, um, and clause libraries and email templates and all this stuff. And everybody uses the same ones for consistency. And then if somebody updates it, it still works for everybody. So that's nice. Um, TextExpander is $10.41 per user per month for the business plans. So it's a little on the spendy side. It does— it was actually originally developed for Mac platform. It works on Windows as well now, um, but you can get sophisticated with this stuff. So the dynamic content insertion can do date calculations, you can do form fields, you can have it pull from other sources, um, but it, you know, the more sophisticated you get, the more difficult it is to use. Then there's another tool that's been on the market for a long time called Activewords, and Activewords only works in Windows. One of the things about Activewords that's different from some of the other products is that it has a keyword trigger system, so you can have it run basically macros. Um, so you can have it open Outlook and start an email to a person with a template all in just a few keystrokes. So it can get a lot more sophisticated, but again, with sophistication comes training and know-how. It's at $37 per year if you buy the annual subscription, or you can just purchase it one time. Of course, the downside to purchasing something one time is it doesn't get updates. So, um, but $37 for the year is not too bad, um, and it doesn't have as many team collaboration features. And then there's another one called PhraseExpress, which is— it's been around for a really long time. It's a really powerful product. It's not on my list because it, it's a little stale from an interface perspective. And then the one I'm going to show y'all, the one that I ended up adopting, is called Text Blaze, and it's a little bit newer. Um, and because of that, some of the Teams features aren't quite as developed as what's in TextExpander, which is kind of the gold standard. Um, the nice thing is Text Blaze is free for basic use. If you want to get the, um, more sophisticated tools, uh, for individuals, the Pro plan is about $35 a year. So that's what I've got, and you can do dynamic input and logic-based conditional. You can have it pull from other sources, um, and it works. There's a Windows and a Mac app, so in addition to working in the browser, it also works, um, on your desktop. And so the documentation is one of the things I really like about it. It just is really easy to use because it's, it's got really, um, good documentation. So let's just go and look at some of this stuff. All right, so I have a bunch of, um, phrases and clauses, but what I want to first do is just show you, um, Text Blaze. And this is the, the desktop. And just to get you started, I did simple things like my name, And so you go in, you can create— they've got sample snippets, which is nice because it gives you a sense of how to create some of these things. And then you've got your snippets. They now have the ability to let you print out all your snippets. So if you can't remember and you've got a long list, you can actually print them out or copy and paste them and put them on your desktop. So that's nice. At this point, I can mostly remember mine, but you build it out. So this was just a simple one because I drop in the link to a lot of stuff. Um, so it's my Calendly link. You create the shortcut and that's what you type to insert. It is case sensitive, so if it's all caps, that needs to be all caps in order to work. And that's— I do all caps just to make sure that, um, I don't type /cal and that's something else. So you have to kind of think about, is this something that I would actually type? Because then it'll automatically pop in, um, that little snip. So this one's a simple one, and I'll just show you what that looks like in, uh, actual use. So if I'm typing a new email and I put my cursor down here and I type "cal," it just drops it in. If I type in "csr," it drops it in, and so on and so forth. So if I type in Oh, so these are just common things that I type in all the time and I don't want to have to do them. And instead of using my templates, I've just switched over because I can drop these in into a text message. So I use RingCentral and I can text from my desktop, which is super fantastic. And so I can just pop these in no matter what application I have to be on. Other things you can do though, you can get more sophisticated. So I have an email that I send out every week, and so I turned this into a quick part or a, um, a Text Blaze snippet. And so what this one does is here's my eBAR submission, and I've added by just adding the date time a date and time. And then I turned this into a fillable form so I can submit the information and then thanks. So you can click on this try it out button, and this is helpful for figuring out whether you've got it right or wrong. So when you do one that has fillable form fields, it pops this up wherever you happen to be. Um, and you put the link and then it says, thanks, Katherine. And then you would insert it in whatever you're doing. So I'm going to show you what this looks like in real life. So when I type in eBAR, it gets— lets me fill out my little form and click Insert. And there you have it. Now, um, If you want to ramp that up a little bit, because obviously this is something that I copy and paste a lot. So, um, in this case, I'm going to— every time I do one of these webinars, I send out a little reminder. And so I turned this into, um, a text-based snippet. So I took the text that I normally do, and I have some variables date and the title of the program. And with this one, I said, thank you for registering, because the title changes and I don't have it anywhere, but I usually go into my events and copy and paste it. I've done this thing called clipboard, and all of the things that you can add to these snippets are over here in your left-hand menu. So you can do date/time. You can have repeat, which I'll show you in a second. Um, clipboard is the one that I used here. You can also have the cursor place. So if you're just going to type it, you can just have it where the cursor appears. You can do forms, and we'll show you that in a second. Um, dropdown menus and toggle fields and all sorts of stuff. So I've got this. So I'm going to go into, um, the web to show you how this works, and I'm going to look at the events page. So I want to make sure that I get it titled whatever I actually put in the event. So when I go to send this reminder, I just select this text and right-click and copy. And then I'm going to go into a new email and remind myself what this thing is called. It pasted the image and that, and I got to fix that. There's some spacing in there that I need to figure out what's going on, but it, it automatically calculated the date for me because I have that Here it's an automatically calculated date, and it pasted from what I copied because that's held in the Windows clipboard. So that's really helpful, and that's where it starts getting a little bit more interesting. Um, let me see if I have All right, so let's create a new one and let's do something a little bit more interesting. So let's find something where, um, so any of these things, you know, dear client, um, Let's see if I can find one that has the name multiple times. I'll just make one up. So we're gonna just call this one, um, so new, new snippet, and we'll call this repeating Name. This is a very mean letter we would never send in real life, um, but I just wanted to show you this, this kind of cool feature, which is this thing called Repeater. So if I click on this— oh, first I have to identify that these are variables. So I'm going to go in here and say name and insert that, and then insert name again. Now when I have things that repeat, then I can go down here to Repeat, and it identifies your variables, so I'll click Name, and then I'll click Name— I'll type in Name, and then we're going to test this, and I'll type in Catherine. I didn't do it correctly, which is where all of their, um, usage stuff comes in. So they have instructions on how to do most everything. So if you are going, I, I can't figure out why this isn't working the way I want to, They have tons of videos, tutorials, step-by-step instructions. Um, and this is also— all of this that's on my desktop is also on the web. Um, but you can go through and it gives you explicit instructions. And then as you're building these things out, you can test them, find out what's wrong, go back, fix it. All that other stuff. So, and then if you want to delete one, you can just right-click and delete. You can also, as I— as you might have noticed, when I right-click, I can duplicate a snippet, I can create folders, and then I can share it with other people on my team. Um, so I have the Pro plan, but I can actually add 5 people who are also using Pro Plan, and we can share across, or we can get the Teams version. So like I said, I'm brand new to this, but the more I use it, the more I find cool things you can do, because you can add, you know, all the form fields, text fields, dropdown menus, um, toggle fields. You can have it calculate date and time. So if I put a date and time field in here, I can have it calculate a date, but I can also have it calculate a further date. So if I say, okay, on this date, and we put a regular date field, this will be due in 2 weeks, I can actually calculate the date that it puts in, and then in 2 weeks, put the next date in there. So it does, it really does a whole lot. And there's instructions, like I said, tutorials, there's a user group. And so it's just a matter of figuring out what you want to use. But what I did just kind of to start was I started gathering, you know, a non-engagement agreement and you just gather all those frequently used things. You can drop this into Word, email. Um, you know, wherever you can type text in, you can drop these things in. So it works everywhere. If you're a Gmail user, you can drop into Gmail. Um, like I said, so that's kind of my quick and dirty overview of this. Um, and I will stop the recording and then if y'all have any questions, we can play around, but Thanks for coming, and, uh, always let me know if there's something you want me to go through and we'll do a little webinar on it. What's the difference between the desk version and the web version? It's exactly the same. So this is my desktop version that we're looking at, and then if I go into the browser version, um, It's exactly the same. So anything I just added in the desktop, it's just that, um, there's no difference that I can tell. They just keep constantly synchronized. So if you've ever used a tool like Evernote, Evernote has a web browser version and an installed version, and they're just constantly in sync.