598 Transcript

Dr. Jeremy Sharp (00:00)
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Testing Psychologist Podcast, the podcast where we talk all about the business and practice of assessment. I’m your host, Dr. Jeremy Sharp, licensed psychologist, group practice owner, and private practice coach.

Dr. Jeremy Sharp (00:12)
Hey folks, welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I am excited to be here as always and thrilled to bring you another business boost episode today. So, business boost, this is the second time that I’ve done this. Last month I did easy automated scheduling. And today I’m gonna be talking about a piece of software that I have used for, gosh, over 10 years now, daily. And it’s so easy and has saved so much time. And that piece of software is Text Expander.

Now, I’ve talked about Text Expander on the podcast in the past, and I’m always happy to highlight it because it just continues to be useful for me, and it’s been a long time. So I want to make sure that folks are aware of it if you are not already using it.

So Text Expander at its core is a piece of software that simplifies the writing process. You create what are called snippets that are short phrases or words or symbols even, and those snippets then expand to correspond to longer phrases, pieces of information, hard to remember items. So essentially you create shortcuts that then expand into bigger or harder to remember pieces of information.

And the good news about this episode is that there is an accompanying video and I’m going to go through a little bit of a demo of Text Expander to show you exactly how it can be helpful for your practice.

Dr. Jeremy Sharp (01:54)
Okay folks, welcome back. Here we are talking about Text Expander. Now, like I said, Text Expander is a piece of software that allows you to create little shortcuts to expand into bigger pieces of information. Now, there are all kinds of uses for Text Expander, and I’m just gonna scratch the surface today and show you kind of the biggest bang for your buck, or the easiest bang for your buck, maybe. So, what we have here is the Text Expander home screen, so to speak.

If you look through, you can see you can have snippet groups. So I have CCA, that’s for my practice, personal reverb, TTP, that’s testing psychologist. You can also share some snippets. This is important for those of you out there because I have this group called TTP Evaluation Report Snippets. And this is a shared group that you can access through Text Expander that has as you can see, tons of diagnostic shortcuts.

ADHD paragraphs, all kinds of things, explanations, report snippets, things like that. So you can do all kinds of things through Text Expander. And I’ll put that link in the show notes for you to access my shared snippet group if you want to go and check that out and plug plug it right into your daily workflow.

Alright, folks, so I’m gonna go ahead and show you how to create a new snippet real quick and then I’ll demonstrate how this can be helpful. So we’re gonna click new snippet. let’s just say that I have trouble remembering my own birthday. this is not my birthday, but let’s say it is, and I wanna type it out and create a snippet to expand into the birth date because I type it a lot. All right, so you type in the information that you want to expand into here in the big box.

You give it a label. We’re gonna call this birthday. Then you type in your actual snippet, like the abbreviation you want to use. I’m a big fan of using, you know, semicolon to start all of my snippets. Some people do periods, some people do X’s, some people do asterisks, but I do like the idea of a symbol to start your snippet, and that way it cuts down on the likelihood that you will accidentally type it if you’re just typing casually and in you know different day-to-day activities.

So I’m gonna do semicolon B Day, and that’s it. So it saves automatically. and now you can type semicolon B Day and it will write out January 1st, 1979. So that’s a very simple example of a snippet you could create. we are not gonna get into the weeds here, but there are all kinds of

snippets that you can create. You can nest snippets within snippets. You can get really fancy with this. But like I said, I am just going to show some basic uses and try to give you some simple, simple applications of Text Expander. All right. So I am going to switch over to a new window now at this point to show you a demo,

Okay, so text expander demo. Now the cool thing about text expander is that it works in pretty much any form field or typing field or Word document or anything like that. So you can use it in email, in Google Docs, in Word, in Internet form fields. It’s all kinds of things. So

I’m just going to show you a few of my snippets. So here’s how this works. First, let’s test the snippet we just created. So I’ll hit semicolon B Day, and there we have the birthday. All right. So ones that I use a lot are my email address. Well, there we go. So that was a separate snippet. The abbreviation for my practice, Colorado Center for Assessment. We could do.

an email address. So I have lots of email addresses. So I save them in here. So those are some pretty simple, pretty simple ways to use text expander.

More advanced ways to use Text Expander might be something like this. So let’s say I am signing reports. I’m gonna create, let’s see, if it will create. Google Docs doesn’t create an automatic line like that. Sorry, y’all. Okay, but I’m gonna go JTS report sig. look at that. It types everything that I put in my report signature. But wait, you might say, what about the actual signature? Well, you can do that too. We’re gonna go JTS.

Signature. All right. So you can create snippets for images, and that’s exactly what I did for my signature.

Let’s say you want to input some information about ADHD. So I might type ADHD explanation. there’s a whole paragraph just about ADHD.

Okay, so as you can see, there are a ton of uses for Text Expander. you can dive in, you can experiment with it, you can try it for free. And even if you want to pay for it, the subscription cost is ludicrously inexpensive, y’all. It’s $60 a year.

So as you can see, there are a ton of uses for text expander. it’s really helpful in writing reports if you have templated paragraphs or information that you tend to write over and over, or even little things like your signatures, like I demonstrated. one of the cool things about text expander is that they keep statistics on how much time you’re saving. And

I went and checked mine just for the sake of this episode. And it was pretty pretty interesting. So I’ve been using Text Expander for gosh, at least 10 years. I have expanded over 17,000 snippets over the course of that 10 years, and it has saved me over 51 hours total.

just in typing time, like time that I would have taken to type that information. I’m a very fast typer, so it calculates that time saved against your words per minute typing average. Mine is very high, it’s around 90 to 100 words per minute. so if you’re a slower typer, this would even it would even be more. I mean, it could be potentially double. So, you know, thinking about like saving a full work week plus 25%.

Over the course of 10 years just from typing is kind of remarkable. So if you want to check out Text Expander, definitely go do that. I’ll put the link in the show notes directly to my shared snippet group if you want to get started with kind of a pre-made group of snippets just for report writing and assessment. let’s see, there’s no affiliate link here or anything like that. So you know, no financial investment.

It’s just a cool tool that I really like, and the team there is great. they’re very responsive, flexible, and they’re continually making updates and making this product better over the last 10 years. So if that sounds interesting, go hit the link in the show notes and save yourself some time.

Dr. Jeremy Sharp (09:09)
All right, y’all. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. Any resources that we mentioned during the episode will be listed in the show notes, so make sure you check those out. If you like what you hear on the podcast, I would be so grateful if you left a review on iTunes or Spotify or whatever

platform you might be listening on. And if you’re a practice owner or aspiring practice owner looking for support in running your assessment practice, check out Craft, which is my membership community just for testing folks.

You can get more info at the testing psychologist dot com slash join craft.

Click here to listen to the podcast instead.