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Preparing Snippet Groups For Sharing

Sharing Snippet Groups with your team or community allows others to benefit from streamlined and consistent messaging, notes, and more. If you’re going to share Snippet Groups with others, there are a few things you can do to prepare.

How to Prepare Snippet Groups for Sharing

  1. Prepare your Snippet content and Snippet Group Settings with the tips below.
  2. Set the default Snippet Group permissions all new Group Members will have.
  3. Set the Snippet Group to be managed by the Organization.

How to Set a Snippet Group to be Managed by the Organization

  1. Open the Snippet Group to the Sharing settings on TextExpander.com.
  2. Scroll down to the “Assign to Organization” section and select your Organization’s name from the menu. Your Snippet Group is now managed by the Organization. This has the benfit of keeping the institutional knowledge with the organization even if the creator should leave. It also aides in the collection of usage statistics.

Remove personal information

If you are revamping already existing Snippets into a shared Group, remove any personal information, such as your own email address or name. A neat way to include personal information in shared Snippets is through nested Snippets.

Notes, Prefixes, Labels, and Abbreviations

Creating a great Snippet is more than just the content. Ensure Snippets are complete with Snippet Group Notes, Group Prefixes, Labels, and Abbreviations for all Snippets. Take a look at our Snippets Overview to learn more about creating great, sharable Snippets.

In each Group’s Settings, there is a Note field. Use this field to explain how you want the team to use the Group.

Help other users avoid abbreviations that overlap and conflict with abbreviations in your Snippet Group by adding a Snippet Group Prefix to yours.

See Snippet Group Prefixes.

Labels are a great place to describe and name your Snippet. Add Labels that describe how and why to use that Snippet. TextExpander uses Labels when you search for Snippets, so make sure you include good keywords, too.

Apply consistent naming

Choose a Snippet Abbreviation convention for naming consistency. Here are a few tips:

Encourage the use of Organization “official” Snippets over personal Snippets for key content

If your team is already using TextExpander they likely have their own versions of some of the Snippets you’re making. Once you put out the new “official” versions they will likely have different abbreviations than the team had for themselves. This means re-learning abbreviations. To make this easier on the team, it is possible to alias Snippets. This way they can expand “official” content and keep using personal abbreviations.

Gather Snippets into specific topics

This makes it easier to share with just the people who need that Group. For example, the Support team might have a Group just for their answers about the macOS platform and the IT team might have a Group just for SQL.